He beckons to me. "Hist!" He has a curious and rather awkward air.
"I say," he says to me affectionately, but looking at his feet, "a bit since, you chucked me a box of flamers. Well, you're going to get a bit of your own back for it. Here!"
He puts something in my hand. "Be careful!" he whispers, "it's fragile!"
Dazzled by the resplendent purity of his present, hardly even daring to believe my eyes, I see—an egg!
XVI
An Idyll
"REALLY and truly," said Paradis, my neighbor in the ranks, "believe me or not, I'm knocked out—I've never before been so paid on a march as I have been with this one, this evening."
His feet were dragging, and his square shoulders bowed under the burden of the knapsack, whose height and big irregular outline seemed almost fantastic. Twice he tripped and stumbled.
Paradis is tough. But he had been running up and down the trench all night as liaison man while the others were sleeping, so he had good reason to be exhausted and to growl "Quoi? These kilometers must be made of india-rubber, there's no way out of it."