only at the loopholes, unless in passing by, or under gold-laced
caps.

Yes, we are truly and deeply different from each other. But we are
alike all the same. In spite of this diversity of age, of country,
of education, of position, of everything possible, in spite of the
former gulfs that kept us apart, we are in the main alike. Under the
same uncouth outlines we conceal and reveal the same ways and
habits, the same simple nature of men who have reverted to the state
primeval.

The same language, compounded of dialect and the slang of workshop
and barracks, seasoned with the latest inventions, blends us in the
sauce of speech with the massed multitudes of men who (for seasons
now) have emptied France and crowded together in the North-East.

Here, too, linked by a fate from which there is no escape, swept
willy-nilly by the vast adventure into one rank, we have no choice
but to go as the weeks and months go--alike. The terrible narrowness
of the common life binds us close, adapts us, merges us one in the
other. It is a sort of fatal contagion. Nor need you, to see how
alike we soldiers are, be afar off--at that distance, say, when we
are only specks of the dust-clouds that roll across the plain.

We are waiting. Weary of sitting, we get up, our joints creaking
like warping wood or old hinges. Damp rusts men as it rusts rifles;
more slowly, but deeper. And we begin again, but not in the same
way, to wait. In a state of war, one is always waiting. We have
become waiting-machines. For the moment it is food we are waiting
for. Then it will be the post. But each in its turn. When we have