"Damned unlikely."
"Anyway, this is the third week we've been in this bloody hole with our feet in the mud."
"They've got us quartered in a barn with a regular brook flowing through the middle of it."
"The main thing about this damned war is ennui—just plain boredom."
"Not forgetting the mud."
Three ambulance drivers in slickers were on the front seat of a car. The rain fell in perpendicular sheets, pattering on the roof of the car and on the puddles that filled the village street. Streaming with water, blackened walls of ruined houses rose opposite them above a rank growth of weeds. Beyond were rain-veiled hills. Every little while, slithering through the rain, splashing mud to the right and left, a convoy of camions went by and disappeared, truck after truck, in the white streaming rain.
Inside the car Tom Randolph was playing an accordion, letting strange nostalgic little songs filter out amid the hard patter of the rain.
"Oh, I's been workin' on de railroad
All de livelong day;
I's been workin' on de railroad
Jus' to pass de time away."
The men on the front seat leaned back and shook the water off their knees and hummed the song.
The accordion had stopped. Tom Randolph was lying on his back on the floor of the car with his arm over his eyes. The rain fell endlessly, rattling on the roof of the car, dancing silver in the coffee-coloured puddles of the road. Their boredom fell into the rhythm of crooning self-pity of the old coon song: