"Not yet was our amazement exhausted ... in vain we sought with every inch of our bodies for some hard spot, for some lurking corner which would hurt; but no spot or corner was there which was not soft and warm!... And we lapsed into bursts of laughter; we expressed our delight and enthusiasm in burlesque, in jokes, each one of which provoked fresh outbursts of laughter...."
"We, that is to say Porchon and myself: Lieutenant Porchon and Lieutenant Genevoix."
There could be nothing more delightful than the comradeship existing between Genevoix of the Ecole Normale and the St. Cyrien, Porchon. They had been trained for widely different destinies, these two young men; the Ecole Normale on the one hand, Saint Cyr on the other! And if they both turned out to be excellent officers, with nothing to choose between them, that does not merely prove the value of the education obtained at the Ecole Normale. It proves something better and greater than that: the deep accord, the healthy unanimity which exists between French minds. So these two companions count the days gaily; they are young and they are French.... But Porchon is the gayer of the two; Genevoix envies him a little for his ready laughter, for the never failing and welcome good humour, to enter into the spirit of which, he says, "I compelled myself as though seeking the conquest of a virtue...."
I like, too, the melancholy underlying this work. This war, foreseen and predicted, but whose horrors completely transcend the imagination, this retrograde movement towards the almost forgotten barbarity of a humanity we thought was marching towards new horizons, was there ever equal cause for human sadness? And there where the Germans, hailing from all parts of Germany, of all professions and creeds, steep themselves to satiation in joys purely cannibalistic, how shall a soldier of France control his tears, or rather how shall he find heart to weep?...
I am pleased, too, that those superb sentiments which sustain courage in moments of superhuman fatigue, which exalt amid perils and horrors, should be touched upon, however lightly, in the following pages. They dwell in the inmost heart of us all, hidden by that timidity, that exaggerated sense of shame, which prohibits us from revealing what is best and most sacred in ourselves. A few words alone suffice, like those written after a reunion of officers when a Captain found himself in command of a Corps, because: