eat in front, laughing. They drove swiftly but
carefully through the darkness, carrying no lights. Inside, the man
continued his imprecations, but they could not hear him.

"Strangers! Sightseers!" he sobbed in misery. "Driving a motor, when it
is I who should drive the motor! Have I not conducted a Paris taxi for
these past ten years? Do I not know how to drive, to manage an engine?
What are they here for--France? No, only themselves! To write a book--to
say what they have done--when it was safe! If it was France, there is
the Foreign Legion--where they would have been welcome--to stand in the
trenches as I have done! But do they enlist? Ah no! It is not safe! They
take my place with the motor, and come to get me--when it is too late."

Then the morphia relieving him, he slept.

* * * * *

In a field hospital, some ten kilometres behind the lines, Marius lay
dying. For three days he had been dying and it was disturbing to the
other patients. The stench of his wounds filled the air, his curses
filled the ward. For Marius knew that he was dying and that he had
nothing to fear. He could express himself as he chose. There would be no
earthly court-martial for him--he was answerable to a higher court. So
Marius gave forth freely to the ward his philosophy of life, his hard,
bare, ugly life, as he had lived it, and his comments on _La Patrie_ as
he understood it. For three days, night and day, he screamed in his
delirium, and no one paid much attention, thinking it was delirium. The
other patients were sometimes diverted and amused, sometimes exceedingly
annoyed, according to whether or not they were sleepy or suffering. And
all the while the wound in the abdomen gave forth a terrible stench,
filling the ward, for he had gas gangrene, the odour of which is
abominable.

Marius had been taken to the _Salle_ of the abdominal wounds, and on one
side of him lay a man with a faecal fistula, which smelled atrociously.
The man with the fistula, however, had got used to himself, so he
complained mightily of Marius. On the other side lay a man who had been
shot through the bladder, and the smell of urine was heavy in the air
round about. Yet this man had also got used to himself, and he too
complained of Marius, and the awful smell of Marius. For Marius had gas
gangrene, and gangrene is death, and it was the smell of death that the
others complained of.

Two beds farther down, lay a boy of twenty, who had