To grumbles against the fatigues which shatter, the waiting which exhausts, the disillusion which destroys, against misery and the blows of cold and rain, he answered violently, "Can't you see it's for France?
Why, hell and damnation! As long as it's for France----!" One morning when we were returning from the trenches, ghastly in a ghastly dawn, during the last minutes of a stage, a panting soldier let the words escape him, "I'm fed up, I am!" The adjutant sprang towards him, "Aren't you ashamed of yourself, hog?
Don't you think that France is worth your dirty skin and all our skins ?" The other, strained and tortured in his joints, showed fight.

"France, you say?
Well, that's the French," he growled.
And his pal, goaded also by weariness, raised his voice from the ranks.
"That's right! After all, it's the men that's there." "Great God!" the adjutant roared in their faces, "France is France and nothing else, and you don't count, nor you either!" But the soldier, all the while hoisting up his knapsack with jerks of his hips, and lowering his voice before the non-com's aggressive excitement, clung to his notion, and murmured between his puffings, "Men--they're humanity.

That's not the truth perhaps ?" Marcassin began to hurry through the drizzle along the side of the marching column, shouting and trembling with emotion, "To hell with your humanity, and your truth, too; I don't give a damn for them.

_I_ know your ideas--universal justice and 1789[1]--to hell with them, too.
There's only one thing that matters in all the earth, and that's the glory of France--to give the Boches a thrashing and get Alsace-Lorraine back, and money, that's where they're taking you, and that's all about it.

Once that's done, all's over.