CHAPTER XII.
THE SHADOWS We did not leave for the trenches on the day we ought to have done.
Evening came, then night--nothing happened.

On the morning of the fifth day some of us were leaning, full of idleness and uncertainty, against the front of a house that had been holed and bunged up again, at the corner of a street.

One of our comrades said to me, "Perhaps we shall stay here till the end of the war." There were signs of dissent, but all the same, the little street we had not left on the appointed day seemed just then to resemble the streets of yore! Near the place where we were watching the hours go by--and fumbling in packets of that coarse tobacco that has skeletons in it--the hospital was installed.

Through the low door we saw a broken stream of poor soldiers pass, sunken and bedraggled, with the sluggish eyes of beggars; and the clean and wholesome uniform of the corporal who led them stood forth among them.
They were always pretty much the same men who haunted the inspection rooms.

Many soldiers make it a point of honor never to report sick, and in their obstinacy there is an obscure and profound heroism.
Others give way and come as often as possible to the gloomy places of the Army Medical Corps, to run aground opposite the major's door.
Among these are found real human remnants in whom some visible or secret malady persists.
The examining-room was contrived in a ground floor room whose furniture had been pushed back in a heap.