Odd how often it is the same thing that people say.
When I ask of a man with the Croix de Guerre what he did to win it, he always says, "Je n'ai fait que comme les autres."
A man going back does not say to us here that he is glad to have his life to offer again for his country. But he says that thing which makes me catch my breath with pride in him. "Je veux b'en. Tous les copains sont là."
They go off like that, to those places of death that they know already, wherein they have seen things we dare not imagine, and all they say about it is that all the copains are there.
There are not many of my ward who go back, ours are the very badly wounded, the men who are out of it.
The men have done all that they could do. Every one of them did all that he could do, and kept on doing it as long as he could. And when he could do no more, why then he was out of it, and it was for others to take up and go on with. He himself was done with it. He would rather not talk about it. It had been so bad that he does not want to talk about it. He does not want to think about it any more.
He would rather talk about things that used to happen "dans le pays," about the vines or the corn, or the fishing boat with oars or with sails, and "la vieille" and "les petiots."
"It is pretty bad?" I say, perhaps, to this one or that one, when I see how he is suffering.
I have never heard one of them say, "C'est pour la France."