One of the sharpshooters overhears our talk as he passes. He looks
upon us, laughs abundantly in his helmeted turban, and repeats our
words with significant shakes of his head: "Pas Kam'rad, non pas
Kam'rad, never! Cut head off!"
"No doubt they're a different race from us, with their tent-cloth
skin," Barque confesses, though he does not know himself what "cold
feet" are. "It worries them to rest, you know; they only live for
the minute when the officer puts his watch back in his pocket and
says, 'Off you go!'"
"In fact, they're real soldiers."
"We are not soldiers," says big Lamuse, "we're men." Though the
evening has grown darker now, that plain true saying sheds something
like a glimmering light on the men who are waiting here, waiting
since the morning. waiting since months ago.
They are men, good fellows of all kinds, rudely torn away from the
joy of life. Like any other men whom you take in the mass, they are
ignorant and of narrow outlook, full of a sound common sense--which
some-times gets off the rails--disposed to be led and to do as they
are bid, enduring under hardships, long-suffering.
They are simple men further simplified, in whom the merely primitive
instincts have been accentuated by the force of circumstances--the
instinct of self-preservation, the hard-gripped hope of living
through, the joy of food, of drink, and of sleep. And at intervals
they are cries and dark shudders of humanity that issue from the
silence and the shadows of their great human hearts.
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