“Yes,” said the captain. “He helps them with their letters, you know, that sort of thing. He’s a good soldier,” he added, with an uncertain glance at the colonel. “Just believes in world revolution, that’s all.”

The colonel gave a snort of disgust.

“I need to know one thing,” said Roland. Did he commit an overt act of mutiny? Did he refuse an order to fight?”

“Not really,” said the captain, with another apologetic look at the colonel. “His advocacy of revolution came after the mutiny began.”

“What the devil does that matter?” cried the colonel.

“He committed an act of revolution, but not of mutiny,” said Roland.

“Are you mad?” cried the colonel.

“There are men in the government at this moment,” Roland said quietly, “who probably believe in world revolution. And after the war, mon colonel, if you wish to take up arms against them, I will fight at your side. I am the Vicomte de Cygne, and I am a royalist. But the instructions I have, which come directly from Pétain, oblige me to counsel you that this Le Sourd is not a mutineer—at least, not the kind we want at present.” He looked at them all severely. “I shall leave you for a short while now, messieurs, and when I return, I shall expect to receive from you the names of the men we are to take for court-martial.”

He walked away from the tent. He wasn’t sorry to be alone. This was the first time that his mission had taken him to the front line. The officers’ tent was just behind a small stand of trees. He walked through them. A short way in front of him he saw some breastwork made of mud and wicker. There was no one there. He could see an observation post thrust somewhat farther along the line.

He looked over the breastwork. It was strange to think that the enemy lay only a few hundred yards away, presumably quite unaware of the crisis taking place across the no-man’s-land between them. He stared ahead gloomily.

War had always been bloody, he thought. Nothing new there. But this war was different. Was there really a place for a man like himself—or for any human being, come to that—in this terrible world of machine guns, barbed wire, shell hole and trench?

Men used to speak of the glory of war. Perhaps that had been a lie. They’d spoken of honor. Perhaps that was only vanity. They’d spoken of grief. Yet there was hardly even grief anymore. Grief had been numbed.

For war was industrial now, like a great iron-wheeled engine of destruction that compressed flesh and broken bone alike into the endless mud of the killing fields. And for what purpose? He could scarcely remember.