The quartermaster calls to us and leads us along a shadow-filled passage-way. The earth beneath our feet is greasy and slippery.
"To the left, turn to the left. I am holding the door," exclaims our guide.
He strikes a match and lights a bit of candle he takes from a pocket at the bottom of which a hundred other similar objects are constantly accumulating. Then, raising the light, and with a magnificent gesture:
"Here you are, gentlemen! You are at home!"
Our home for that night! That which once was a home! It is no more now than a soulless hovel, a camping-place for casual wayfarers like ourselves, who halt there for a few hours in passing to warm their frozen bodies, and then go on their way, indifferent, unregretful, leaving no trace of their hearts behind them within these old walls, old walls which enshrine the memory of hearts now still, the memory too of hearts not still, but far away in exile, who, remembering the old home, suffer!
Not long elapses before our haven is invaded. The fatigue party appears bringing up the rations for distribution. On a piece of tent canvas spread on the earth, coffee, sugar and rice are heaped in little piles. The corporal on duty, coatless, vestless, with his shirt opened to display a muscular white chest, calls up the sections one after the other. As the men approach, he indicates one of the little heaps with an almost imperceptible movement of his forefinger. Growls and reproaches move him not at all.
"That the sugar? A fat lot, isn't it? Why, you gave the third twice as much as this! It's a bit too thick!"
"There were five extra in the third," replies the corporal. "If you are not satisfied, you had better go and complain to the Ministry. That's all about it!"
During this time, Martin, a miner from the north, busies himself hacking to pieces on the table a huge quarter of beef. To assist him in this undertaking, he has no more than a pocket-knife, a pocket-knife with a safety-catch and a solid blade, which he has possessed since Vauxmarie. He tells us it was given to him by a Boche prisoner overjoyed at finding himself a prisoner, that it is a famous piece of goods, and that there is not another knife in all the company for chopping up a bit of beef to equal that Boche knife handled by him, Martin.
But Martin is a virtuoso where carving is concerned. He perches himself on top of the enormous mass of flesh, slices away at it with long straight strokes, hacks away savagely at resisting tendons, hunching his shoulders, clenching his teeth, flattening still more his polecat-like nose, handling the knife in a very frenzy, grunting, slashing and swearing. And when finally the task is achieved, a profoundly deep sigh of relief escapes Martin. He turns, screws up his eyes, widens his mouth with a smile distorted by the quid he is chewing, squirts a jet of brown saliva from the corner of his mouth on to the ground, and says in a self-satisfied tone, in the tone of a conqueror who, the fight finished, wishes to forget any asperity which may have marred it: