"Stop it!" Another box on the ear. "You are all right. You wanted to be a volunteer; now you see how much fun it is."
"I?"
"Yes, you.... You were the cause of the fine talking-to my general gave me, and you made me lose my place as an orderly where I had a chance to make extra soldi. If you hadn't gone and told him that you had helped me to carry his things and if you hadn't slipped under the seat of that same officer to listen to what he said, I shouldn't have been punished by being sent to the front."
"Are you afraid, then, Mollica?"
"I afraid? But don't you know that if I catch sight of an Austrian I'll eat him?"
"Like the food you took from the general," that rascal of a Pinocchio dared to remark.
There was a chorus of laughs that stopped as if by magic at the sound of a certain roar in the distance and of something whistling through the air and very near.
"There they are!"
"We're in it."
"Where?"