Mallet wore a medallion on his breast.... The night before the attack he had said quietly to a friend—
"If I die, send this medallion to my wife."
The friend now tenderly unclasps it from his capote. As this latter is being removed from the body, the cloth, covered with frozen mud, is as stiff as cardboard.
After a prolonged examination we recognize Corporal Lion, whose good-natured face has been rendered unrecognizable by a wound. He is another who, speaking of his young wife and children and his past happiness, had imprudently said: "It's all over with me.... I shall never come back!..." There is some difficulty in taking from his shrivelled finger the wedding-ring, the gold of which still shines a little beneath the enveloping mud.
Our nerves are now too hardened for such a sight to affect them. Emotion has become calm and considerate, and each of us thinks—
"Well, if I were in his place, would there be around my body nothing but this cold and gloom of winter?"
The sergeant summons me along with Reymond and Maxence to go on cemetery duty—
"Take a shovel or a pick and go down to Bucy."
In the old cemetery surrounding the church, a lieutenant indicates the spot where we must dig a grave for eight men.