“Then we shall not have suffered for nothing,” said a lad from Montmédy. “I was two days in the forest with five comrades. We made holes in the trees to suck the sap. We had hallucinations. Two of them killed themselves.” Louis Ludes, a baker from Pouzolles, wounded in Morocco, and wounded again at Lunéville, the worst of wounds, a shell in the abdomen (his recovery astonished all the surgeons), exclaimed: “I too, tonnerre, I am in this victory!”
And while they were looking at the beautiful Greek with the mighty wings, Dutrex, who was reading the Burgraves, declaimed to us in his grating bass voice, full of cruel irony, the mendicant’s apostrophe:
Les Vandales ont pris Berlin! Ah! quel tableau!
Les païens à Dantzig! Les Mogols à Breslau!
Tout cela dans l’esprit en même temps me monte
Pêle-mêle, au hasard; mais c’est horrible!… ô honte!…
Allemagne, Allemagne, Allemagne.… Hélas![29]