We go back together in silence and re-enter the dugout where the others are gathered. It is an old headquarters post, and spacious. Just as we slide in, Paradis listens. "Our batteries have been playing extra hell for the last hour, don't you think?"
I know what he means, and reply with an empty gesture, "We shall see, old man, we shall see all right!"
In the dug-out, to an audience of three, Tirette is again pouring out his barrack-life tales. Marthereau is snoring in a corner; he is close to the entry, and to get down we have to stride over his short legs, which seem to have gone back into his trunk. A group of kneeling men around a folded blanket are playing with cards—
"My turn!"—"40, 42—48—49!—Good!"
"Isn't he lucky, that game-bird; it's imposs', I've got stumped three times I want nothing more to do with you. You're skinning me this evening, and you robbed me the other day, too, you infernal fritter!"—"What did you revoke for, mugwump?"—"I'd only the king, nothing else."
"All the same," murmurs some one who is eating in a corner, "this Camembert, it cost twenty-five sous, but you talk about muck! Outside there's a layer of sticky glue, and inside it's plaster that breaks."
Meanwhile Tirette relates the outrages inflicted on him during his twenty-one days of training owing to the quarrelsome temper of a certain major: "A great hog he was, my boy, everything rotten on this earth. All the lot of us looked foul when he went by or when we saw him in the officers' room spread out on a chair that you couldn't see underneath him, with his vast belly and huge cap, and circled round with stripes from top to bottom, like a barrel—he was hard on the private! They called him Loeb—a Boche, you see!"
"I knew him!" cried Paradis; "when war started he was declared unfit for active service, naturally. While I was doing my term he was a dodger already—but he dodged round all the street corners to pinch you—you got a day's clink for an unbuttoned button, and he gave it you over and above if there was some bit of a thing about you that wasn't quite O.K.—and everybody laughed. He thought they were laughing at you, and you knew they were laughing at him, but you knew it in vain, you were in it up to your head for the clink."
"He had a wife," Tirette goes on, "the old—"
"I remember her, too," Paradis exclaimed. "You talk about a bitch!"