"Not likely!" growl the men, without moving.
"It'll be of use in relieving the boys," the adjutant goes on.
With that the grumbling ceases, and several heads are raised.
"Here!" says Lamuse.
"Get into your harness, big 'un, and come with me." Lamuse buckles
on his knapsack, rolls up his blanket, and fetters his pouches.
Since his seizure of unlucky affection was allayed, he has become
more melancholy than before, and although a sort of fatality makes
him continually stouter, he has become engrossed and isolated, and
rarely speaks.
In the evening something comes along the trench, rising and falling
according to the lumps and holes in the ground; a shape that seems
in the shadows to be swimming, that outspreads its arms sometimes,
as though appealing for help. It is Lamuse.
He is among us again, covered with mold and mud. He trembles and
streams with sweat, as one who is afraid. His lips stir, and he
gasps, before they can shape a word.
"Well, what is there?" we ask him vainly.
He collapses in a corner among us and prostrates himself. We offer
him wine, and he refuses it with a sign. Then he turns towards me
and beckons me with a movement of his head.
When I am by him he whispers to me, very low, and as if in church,
"I have seen Eudoxie again." He gasps for breath, his chest wheezes,
and with his eyeballs fast fixed upon a nightmare, he says, "She was
putrid."
"It was the place we'd lost," Lamuse went on, "and that the
Colonials took again with the bayonet ten days ago.
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