"You haven't!" cried Jacques, with a burst of laughter. "Then you must be singularly easy to please. Ah, I know, you are homesick."
Raboustel laughed.
"I have not thought of home for a week. No, you are wrong, Corporal, it is neither the food, nor the barracks, nor the thought of home that is troubling me, it is something else."
He told his position in a few words. He had come to care for a girl and he had no money with which to buy her a present, nothing to offer her.
Jacques listened. At the word "girl" he had been on the point of laughing, then he saw in a flash that this was a serious business for Raboustel.
The position of a man in the Legion is such that honest aspirations and ambitions are absurd, unless they be purely military, and even then they are rarely fulfilled, and as for love!
Jacques whistled when the other told him all.
"You will have trouble there," said he. "You will have the old man on top of you; does he know about it?"
"Not he," said Raboustel.
"Well, he is sure to get to know, and then your trouble will begin. You see, you are a légionnaire."