his prisoner’s canteen filled. Then we drank again. 

 He smiled as he told me he was getting ten years. Three years at solitary confinement was it, and seven working in a gang on the road? That would not be so bad. He wished he was not married, had not a little child. “The bachelors are lucky in this war”—he smiled. 

 Now the gendarmes began cleaning their beards, brushing their stomachs, spreading their legs, collecting their baggage. The reddish eyes, little and cruel, woke from the trance of digestion and settled with positive ferocity on their prey. “You will have no use….” 

 Silently the sensitive, gentle hands of the divine prisoner undid the blanket-cover. Silently the long, tired, well-shaped arms passed it across to the brigand at my left side. With a grunt of satisfaction the brigand stuffed it in a large pouch, taking pains that it should not show. Silently the divine eyes said to mine: “What can we do, we criminals?” And we smiled at each other for the last time, the eyes and my eyes. 

 A station. The apache descends. I follow with my numerous affaires. The divine man follows me—the v-f-g him. 

 The blanket-roll containing my large fur-coat got more and more unrolled; finally I could not possibly hold it. 

 It fell. To pick it up I must take the sack off my back. 

 Then comes a voice, “allow me if you please, monsieur”—and the sack has disappeared. Blindly and dumbly I stumble on with the roll; and so at length we come into the yard of a little prison; and the divine man bowed under my great sack…. I never thanked him. When I turned, they’d taken him away, and the sack stood accusingly at my feet. 

 Through the complete disorder of my numbed mind flicker jabbings of strange tongues. Some high boy’s voice is appealing to me in Belgian, Italian, Polish, Spanish and—beautiful English. “Hey, Jack, give me a cigarette, Jack….” 

 I lift my eyes. I am standing in a tiny oblong space. A sort of court. All around, two-story wooden barracks. Little crude staircases lead up to doors heavily chained and immensely padlocked. More like ladders than stairs. Curious hewn windows, smaller in proportion than the slits in a doll’s house. Are these faces behind the slits? The doors bulge incessantly under the shock of bodies hurled against them from within. The whole dirty nouveau business about to crumble. 

 Glance 

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