Burette leads us there in triumph. It is his discovery. He crosses the court, and opens majestically a small low door, with a barrel on each side in which stunted geraniums vegetate miserably.
It is an old pig-sty!
Scraped and washed with a lot of water, it will be habitable. We’ll make something out of it. Burette borrows a long table and at once covers it with his innumerable account books. We make our beds against the walls.
Thirty ammunition caissons placed in double rows, a mattress stuffed with hay, a tent cloth, two covers—that’s our camp.
The corner at the back falls to Morin. It is the longest way of the room and he can stretch out his whole tall form at his ease, which he rarely finds it possible to do in the cantonments.
Night reserves various distractions for us.
First, the rats.
The rats descended from the dove-cote in a dense horde and made incursions on our haversacks, in mad gallops over our bed clothes—gigantic rats with interminable tails!
They used the open space between the beds as their lists and had real battles, biting, crying and moaning. The routed fugitives jumped over Morin’s body to get to shelter and he shivered in terror.