He had scarcely thought this when he heard behind him the thunder of Italian guns. A quarter of an hour later and the Austrians were quite quiet. But the situation hadn't improved. Orders had come from the second line to hold out at all costs because it wouldn't be possible to relieve them until the next evening. An attack in force was expected every minute.
The captain assembled his company and said: "Men, we must stick and be ready for anything. We can't have reinforcements, but to-night they will send us chevaux de frise and barbed wire. But I don't want to be caught like a bird in a net. We have plenty of 'jelly.' If two would volunteer to carry a couple of pounds of it under the entanglements of those gentlemen over yonder we might be able to change our lodgings. They have a fine trench of reinforced concrete with rooms and good beds and bathroom. We'd be better off there than in this mud. What do you say, boys? Is there any one who ..."
They didn't even let him finish. All stepped forward, and, if I am to tell you the truth, Pinocchio, too, but no one noticed him. Mollica and the Bersaglierino were chosen.
It grew dark. Some of them, completely worn out, dozed leaning up against the side of the trench. The Bersaglierino was writing rapidly a letter in pencil. Mollica had pulled out of his knapsack the old newspapers his father had sent him and seemed about to take up his old studies of fingerprints. There were tears in his eyes.
"Heh! Mollica, you look as if you weren't pleased with the duty the captain has given you."
"Well?"
"But you ought to let me go."
"You? But how do you suppose they would let a boy like you carry jelly?"
"Do you think I would eat it all up? I won't say that I mightn't taste it, especially if it is that golden-yellow kind that shivers like a paralytic old man, but I would carry out the order like any one else.... Only, I can't understand how for a little bit of jelly those scoundrels will give up their comfortable trench. It's true that they eat all sorts of miserable kinds of food and that Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage, but ..."
"Shut up, you chatterbox! You'll see what will happen. I'll explain to you that 'jelly' in war-time is what we call a mixture of stuff that when put in a pipe under the wire entanglements and set off by a fuse will blow you up sky-high in a thousand pieces, if you don't take to your heels in time."