“What, you leave this evening? so soon as that?”
“But you are scarcely set up again. That was just what I said to a comrade yesterday, pointing you out to him, that you must have been terribly wounded. What? You are going away this evening? Your country must be very short of men. They are sending you to fight the Cossacks. Well, to tell you the truth, I am glad it is you instead of me.”
“Ah yes!” sighed the German; “they are terrible, they burn everything on their way.”
“Well, there is this much good about it, you need not fear the cold, since it is summer.”
“You have not the cold to fear,” said the youngest Frenchman, “that is true, but in your place I would rather have one or two frozen feet, or even die of wounds, than be carried off by typhus. It is a terrible illness, that kills those that catch it without exception. You know that your soldiers are dying like flies there?”
“I have been vaccinated.”
“Vaccinated? Go along with you! You know as well as I do the uselessness of inoculation. It doesn’t make you immune. It has only a moral effect. Your troops would refuse to go to the Russian front if they had not confidence in this vaccine, the efficacity of which is, alas! nothing. They would not go there to seek a terrible and fatal death. Your officers and doctors know it well.”
“In any case I am not going back to the Eastern front.”
“You are lucky. I congratulate you.”
“Lucky?” replied another. “Well, perhaps. As for me, I confess it frankly, if I could choose I would rather go and brave the typhus than our French 75’s. You have not yet seen them at work, it is true; you don’t know anything about it. But your comrades must have spoken of them to you. Ah, you will quickly learn to recognise their ‘boom, boom,’ and you will give me news of them. May I be hanged if you return whole.”