car ready, my friend."

The brancardiers set the stretcher down at the top of the steps that led to the door of the dugout, so that Martin found himself looking into the lean, sensitive face, stained a little with blood about the mouth, of the wounded man. His eyes followed along the shapeless bundles of blood-flecked uniform till they suddenly turned away. Where the middle of the man had been, where had been the curved belly and the genitals, where the thighs had joined with a strong swerving of muscles to the trunk, was a depression, a hollow pool of blood, that glinted a little in the cold diffusion of grey light from the west.

The rain beat hard on the window-panes of the little room and hissed down the chimney into the smouldering fire that sent up thick green smoke. At a plain oak table before the fireplace sat Martin Howe and Tom Randolph, Tom Randolph with his sunburned hands with their dirty nails spread flat and his head resting on the table between them, so that Martin could see the stiff black hair on top of his head and the dark nape of his neck going into shadow under the collar of the flannel shirt.

"Oh, God, it's too damned absurd! An arrangement for mutual suicide and no damned other thing," said Randolph, raising his head.

"A certain jolly asinine grotesqueness, though. I mean, if you were God and could look at it like that ... Oh, Randy, why do they enjoy hatred so?"

"A question of taste ... as the lady said when she kissed the cow."

"But it isn't. It isn't natural for people to hate that way, it can't be. It even disgusts the perfectly stupid damn-fool people, like Higgins, who believes that the Bible was written in God's own handwriting and that the newspapers tell the truth."

"It makes me sick at ma stomach, Howe, to talk to one of those hun-hatin' women, if they're male or female."

"It is a stupid affair, la vie, as the doctor at P.1. said yesterday...."

"Hell, yes...."

They sat silent, watching the rain beat on the window, and run down in sparkling finger-like streams.

"What I can't get over is these Frenchwomen." Randolph threw back his head and laughed. "They're so bloody frank. Did I tell you about what happened to me at that last village on the Verdun road?"

"No."

"I was lyin' down for a nap under a plum-tree, a wonderfully nice place near a li'l brook an' all, an' suddenly that crazy Jane ... You know the one that used to throw stones at us out of that broken-down house at the corner of the road.... Anyway, she comes up to me with a funny look in her eyes an' starts makin' love to me. I had a regular wrastlin' match gettin' away from her."

"Funny position for you to be in, getting away from a woman."

"But doesn't that strike you funny? Why down where I come from a drunken mulatto woman wouldn't act like that. They all keep up a fake of not wantin' your attentions." His black eyes sparkled, and he laughed his deep ringing laugh, that made the withered woman smile as she set an omelette before them.

"Voilà, messieurs," she said with a grand air, as if it were a boar's head that she was serving.

Three French infantrymen came into the café, shaking the rain off their shoulders.

"Nothing to drink but champagne at four francs fifty," shouted Howe. "Dirty night out, isn't it?"

"We'll drink that, then!"

Howe and Randolph moved up and they all sat at the same table.

"Fortune of war?"

"Oh, the war, what do you think of the war?" cried Martin.

"What do you think of the peste? You think about saving your skin."

"What's amusing about us is that we three have all saved our skins together," said one of the Frenchmen.

"Yes. We are of the same class," said another, holding up his thumb. "Mobilised same day." He held up his first finger. "Same company." He held up a second finger. "Wounded by the same shell.... Evacuated to the same hospital. Convalescence at same time.... Réformé to the same depôt behind the lines."

"Didn't all marry the same girl, did you, to make it complete?" asked Randolph.

They all shouted with laughter until the glasses along the bar rang.

"You must be Athos, Porthos, and d'Artagnan."

"We are," they shouted.

"Some more champagne, madame, for the three musketeers," sang Randolph in a sort of operatic yodle.

"All I have left is this," said the withered woman, setting a bottle down on the table.

"Is that poison?"

"It's cognac, it's very good cognac," said the old woman seriously.

"C'est du cognac! Vive le roi cognac!" everybody shouted.