Excitement grows around that bayonet. The young girl, who is beautiful and expansive, cannot tear herself away from it. At last she touches it with her finger, and shudders. She does not disguise her pleasant emotion:—
"I confess I'm a patriot! I'm more than that—I'm a patriot and a militarist!"
All heads around her are nodded in approval. That kind of talk never seems intemperate, for it touches on sacred things.
And I, I see—in the night which falls for a moment, amid the tempest of dying men which is subsiding on the ground—I see a monster in the form of a man and in the form of a vulture, who, with the death-rattle in his throat, holds towards that young girl the horrible head that is scalped with a coronet, and says to her: "You do not know me, and you do not know, but you are like me!"
The young girl's living laugh, as she goes off with a young officer, recalls me to events.
All those who come after each other to the bayonet speak in the same way, and have the same proud eyes.
"They're not stronger than us, let me tell you! It's us that's the strongest!"
"Our allies are very good, but it's lucky for them we're there on the job."
"Ah, la, la!"
"Why, yes, there's only the French for it. All the world admires them.
Only we're always running ourselves down."