“This is the sarjon, Yvonne,” said Fuselli.
“Oui, oui, je sais,” said Yvonne, smiling at the top sergeant. They sat in the little room behind the shop and drank white wine, and talked as best they could to Yvonne, who, very trim in her black dress and blue apron, perched on the edge of her chair with her feet in tiny pumps pressed tightly together, and glanced now and then at the elaborate stripes on the top sergeant's arm.
Fuselli strode familiarly into the grocery shop, whistling, and threw open the door to the inner room. His whistling stopped in the middle of a bar.
“Hello,” he said in an annoyed voice.
“Hello, corporal,” said Eisenstein. Eisenstein, his French soldier friend, a lanky man with a scraggly black heard and burning black eyes, and Stockton, the chalky-faced boy, were sitting at the table that filled up the room, chatting intimately and gaily with Yvonne, who leaned against the yellow wall beside the Frenchman and showed all her little pearly teeth in a laugh. In the middle of the dark oak table was a pot of hyacinths and some glasses that had had wine in them. The odor of the hyacinths hung in the air with a faint warm smell from the kitchen.
After a second's hesitation, Fuselli sat down to wait until the others should leave. It was long after pay-day and his pockets were empty, so he had nowhere else to go.
“How are they treatin' you down in your outfit now?” asked Eisenstein of Stockton, after a silence.
“Same as ever,” said Stockton in his thin voice, stuttering a little.... “Sometimes I wish I was dead.”
“Hum,” said Eisenstein, a curious expression of understanding on his flabby face. “We'll be civilians some day.”
“I won't” said Stockton.