I think that Rabot would have willingly offered his good cigarettes to his neighbours; but it is so difficult to talk sometimes, especially to give something to some one. The cigarettes got slowly covered with dust on the table, and Rabot lay flat on his back, quite thin and straight, like a bit of straw carried away by the torrent of war, and understanding nothing of what was happening all around him.
One day a staff officer came into the ward and went up to Rabot.
“That is the man,” he said. “Well, I have brought him the Military Medal and the Croix de Guerre.”
He made Rabot sign a little paper and left him alone with his playthings. Rabot did not laugh. He put the case out on the bedclothes in front of him, and he looked at it from nine o’clock in the morning till three in the afternoon.
At three the officer returned, and said:
“I made a mistake. The decorations were not for Rabot, but for Raboux.”
Then he took the jewel-case, tore up the receipt, and went away.
Rabot cried from three o’clock in the afternoon till nine o’clock in the evening. Then he went to sleep. The next morning he began to cry again. M. Gossin, who is a good Director, went to Headquarters and came back with a medal and a cross just like the last; he even made Rabot sign another paper.
Rabot stopped crying. But his face was still haunted by a shadow—the shadow of a constant dread, as if he feared that one day or other they would come and take away all his treasures.
Some weeks passed. I often looked at Rabot’s face, and I tried to imagine what laughter would make of it. I imagined and looked in vain; it was obvious that Rabot did not know how to laugh, and that his face was not made that way.