“What is this place, here?”
“It is Taissy.”
“Ah!”
“Is it far from the trenches?”
“Oh, no, mon garçon; only about fifteen hundred metres.”
Then they tell their story. They are cripples, mostly lame, who are waiting for vehicles to take them back to the dressing-stations. They have been in the trenches for a month; they have fought; they give details of their battles. We do not see them. We hear only detached phrases which come to us confusedly out of the night.
“A dirty hole. We lost a heap of men.”
“There’s a fort up there which we recaptured.”
“There were three counter-attacks.”
“Then, a dirty canal full of rotten meat. What a stink!”