Under Fire: The Story of a Squad
TextThe same language, compounded of dialect and the slang of workshop and barracks, seasoned with the latest inventions, blends us in the sauce of speech with the massed multitudes of men who (for seasons now) have emptied France and crowded together in the North-East.
Here, too, linked by a fate from which there is no escape, swept willy-nilly by the vast adventure into one rank, we have no choice but to go as the weeks and months go—alike. The terrible narrowness of the common life binds us close, adapts us, merges us one in the other. It is a sort of fatal contagion. Nor need you, to see how alike we soldiers are, be afar off—at that distance, say, when we are only specks of the dust-clouds that roll across the plain.
We are waiting. Weary of sitting, we get up, our joints creaking like warping wood or old hinges. Damp rusts men as it rusts rifles; more slowly, but deeper. And we begin again, but not in the same way, to wait. In a state of war, one is always waiting. We have become waiting-machines. For the moment it is food we are waiting for. Then it will be the post. But each in its turn. When we have done with dinner we will think about the letters. After that, we shall set ourselves to wait for something else.
Hunger and thirst are urgent instincts which formidably excite the temper of my companions. As the meal gets later they become grumblesome and angry. Their need of food and drink snarls from their lips—"That's eight o'clock. Now, why the hell doesn't it come?"
"Just so, and me that's been pining since noon yesterday," sulks Lamuse, whose eyes are moist with longing, while his cheeks seem to carry great daubs of wine-colored grease-paint.
Discontent grows more acute every minute.
"I'll bet Plumet has poured down his own gullet my wine ration that he's supposed to have, and others with it, and he's lying drunk over there somewhere."
"It's sure and certain"—Marthereau seconds the proposition.
"Ah, the rotters, the vermin, these fatigue men!" Tirloir bellows. "An abominable race—all of 'em—mucky-nosed idlers! They roll over each other all day long at the rear, and they'll be damned before they'll be in time. Ah, if I were boss, they should damn quick take our places in the trenches, and they'd have to work for a change. To begin with, I should say, 'Every man in the section will carry grease and soup in turns.' Those who were willing, of course—"
"I'm confident," cries Cocon, "it's that Pepere that's keeping the others back. He does it on purpose, firstly, and then, too, he can't finish plucking himself in the morning, poor lad. He wants ten hours for his flea-hunt, he's so finicking; and if he can't get 'em, monsieur has the pip all day."
"Be damned to him," growls Lamuse. "I'd shift him out of bed if only I was there! I'd wake him up with boot-toe, I'd—"
"I was reckoning, the other day," Cocon went on; "it took him seven hours forty-seven minutes to come from thirty-one dug-out. It should take him five good hours, but no longer."
Cocon is the Man of Figures. He has a deep affection, amounting to rapacity, for accuracy in recorded computation. On any subject at all, he goes burrowing after statistics, gathers them with the industry of an insect, and serves them up on any one who will listen. Just now, while he wields his figures like weapons, the sharp ridges and angles and triangles that make up the paltry face where perch the double discs of his glasses, are contracted with vexation. He climbs to the firing-step (made in the days when this was the first line), and raises his head angrily over the parapet. The light touch of a little shaft of cold sunlight that lingers on the land sets a-glitter both his glasses and the diamond that hangs from his nose.
"And that Pepere, too, talk about a drinking-cup with the bottom out! You'd never believe the weight of stuff he can let drop on a single journey."
With his pipe in the corner, Papa Blaire fumes in two senses. You can see his heavy mustache trembling. It is like a comb made of bone, whitish and drooping.
"Do you want to know what I think? These dinner men, they're the dirtiest dogs of all. It's 'Blast this' and 'Blast that'—John Blast and Co., I call 'em."
"They have all the elements of a dunghill about them," says Eudore, with a sigh of conviction. He is prone on the ground, with his mouth half-open and the air of a martyr. With one fading eye he follows the movements of Pepin, who prowls to and fro like a hyaena.
Their spiteful exasperation with the loiterers mounts higher and higher. Tirloir the Grumbler takes the lead and expands. This is where he comes in. With his little pointed gesticulations he goads and spurs the anger all around him.
"Ah, the devils, what? The sort of meat they threw at us yesterday! Talk about whetstones! Beef from an ox, that? Beef from a bicycle, yes rather! I said to the boys, 'Look here, you chaps, don't you chew it too quick, or you'll break your front teeth on the nails!'"
Tirloir's harangue—he was manager of a traveling cinema, it seems—would have made us laugh at other times, but in the present temper it is only echoed by a circulating growl.
"Another time, so that you won't grumble about the toughness, they send you something soft and flabby that passes for meat, something with the look and the taste of a sponge—or a poultice. When you chew that, it's the same as a cup of water, no more and no less."
"Tout ca," says Lamuse, "has no substance; it gets no grip on your guts. You think you're full, but at the bottom of your tank you're empty. So, bit by bit, you turn your eyes up, poisoned for want of sustenance."
"The next time," Biquet exclaims in desperation, "I shall ask to see the old man, and I shall say, 'Mon capitaine'—"
"And I," says Barque, "shall make myself look sick, and I shall say, 'Monsieur le major'—"
"And get nix or the kick-out—they're all alike—all in a band to take it out of the poor private."
"I tell you, they'd like to get the very skin off us!"
"And the brandy, too! We have a right to get it brought to the trenches—as long as it's been decided somewhere—I don't know when or where, but I know it—and in the three days that we've been here, there's three days that the brandy's been dealt out to us on the end of a fork!"
"Ah, malheur!"
"There's the grub!" announces a poilu1 who was on the look-out at the corner.
"Time, too!"
And the storm of revilings ceases as if by magic. Wrath is changed into sudden contentment.
Three breathless fatigue men, their faces streaming with tears of sweat, put down on the ground some large tins, a paraffin can, two canvas buckets, and a file of loaves, skewered on a stick. Leaning against the wall of the trench, they mop their faces with their handkerchiefs or sleeves. And I see Cocon go up to Pepere with a smile, and forgetful of the abuse he had been heaping on the other's reputation, he stretches out a cordial hand towards one of the cans in the collection that swells the circumference of Pepere, after the manner of a life-belt.
"What is there to eat?"
"It's there," is the evasive reply of the second fatigue man, whom experience has taught that a proclamation of the menu always evokes the bitterness of disillusion. So they set themselves to panting abuse of the length and the difficulties of the trip they have just accomplished: "Some crowds about, everywhere! It's a tough job to get along—got to disguise yourself as a cigarette paper, sometimes."—"And there are people who say they're shirkers in the kitchens!" As for him, he would a hundred thousand times rather be with the company in the trenches, to mount guard and dig, than earn his keep by such a job, twice a day during the night!
Paradis, having lifted the lids of the jars, surveys the recipients and announces, "Kidney beans in oil, bully, pudding, and coffee—that's all."
"Nom de Dieu!" bawls Tulacque. "And wine?" He summons the crowd: "Come and look here, all of you! That—that's the limit! We're done out of our wine!"
Athirst and grimacing, they hurry up; and from the profoundest depths of their being wells up the chorus of despair and disappointment, "Oh, Hell!"
"Then what's that in there?" says the fatigue man, still ruddily sweating, and using his foot to point at a bucket.
"Yes," says Paradis, "my mistake, there is some."
The fatigue man shrugs his shoulders, and hurls at Paradis a look of unspeakable scorn—"Now you're beginning! Get your gig-lamps on, if your sight's bad." He adds, "One cup each—rather less perhaps—some chucklehead bumped against me, coming through the Boyau du Bois, and a drop got spilled." "Ah!" he hastens to add, raising his voice, "if I hadn't been loaded up, talk about the boot-toe he'd have got in the rump! But he hopped it on his top gear, the brute!"
In spite of this confident assurance, the fatigue man makes off himself, curses overtaking him as he goes, maledictions charged with offensive reflections on his honesty and temperance, imprecations inspired by this revelation of a ration reduced.
All the same, they throw themselves on the food, and eat it standing, squatting, kneeling, sitting on tins, or on haversacks pulled out of the holes where they sleep—or even prone, their backs on the ground, disturbed by passers-by, cursed at and cursing. Apart from these fleeting insults and jests, they say nothing, the primary and universal interest being but to swallow, with their mouths and the circumference thereof as greasy as a rifle-breech. Contentment is theirs.
At the earliest cessation of their jaw-bones' activity, they serve up the most ribald of raillery. They knock each other about, and clamor in riotous rivalry to have their say. One sees even Farfadet smiling, the frail municipal clerk who in the early days kept himself so decent and clean amongst us all that he was taken for a foreigner or a convalescent. One sees the tomato-like mouth of Lamuse dilate and divide, and his delight ooze out in tears. Poterloo's face, like a pink peony, opens out wider and wider. Papa Blaire's wrinkles flicker with frivolity as he stands up, pokes his head forward, and gesticulates with the abbreviated body that serves as a handle for his huge drooping mustache. Even the corrugations of Cocon's poor little face are lighted up.
Becuwe goes in search of firewood to warm the coffee. While we wait for our drink, we roll cigarettes and fill pipes. Pouches are pulled out. Some of us have shop-acquired pouches in leather or rubber, but they are a minority. Biquet extracts his tobacco from a sock, of which the mouth is drawn tight with string. Most of the others use the bags for anti-gas pads, made of some waterproof material which is an excellent preservative of shag, be it coarse or fine; and there are those who simply fumble for it in the bottom of their greatcoat pockets.
The smokers spit in a circle, just at the mouth of the dug-out which most of the half-section inhabit, and flood with tobacco-stained saliva the place where they put their hands and feet when they flatten themselves to get in or out.
But who notices such a detail?
Now, a propos of a letter to Marthereau from his wife, they discuss produce.
"La mere Marthereau has written," he says. "That fat pig we've got at home, a fine specimen, guess how much she's worth now?"
But the subject of domestic economy degenerates suddenly into a fierce altercation between Pepin and Tulacque. Words of quite unmistakable significance are exchanged. Then—"I don't care a what you say or what you don't say! Shut it up!"—"I shall shut it when I want, midden!"—"A seven-pound thump would shut it up quick enough!"—"Who from? Who'll give it me?"—"Come and find out!"
They grind their teeth and approach each other in a foaming rage. Tulacque grasps his prehistoric ax, and his squinting eyes are flashing. The other is pale and his eyes have a greenish glint; you can see in his blackguard face that his thoughts are with his knife.
But between the two, as they grip each other in looks and mangle in words, Lamuse intervenes with his huge pacific head, like a baby's, and his face of sanguinary hue: "Allons, allons! You're not going to cut yourselves up! Can't be allowed!"
The others also interpose, and the antagonists are separated, but they continue to hurl murderous looks at each other across the barrier of their comrades. Pepin mutters a residue of slander in tones that quiver with malice—
"The hooligan, the ruffian, the blackguard! But wait a bit! I'll see him later about this!"
On the other side, Tulacque confides in the poilu who is beside him: "That crab-louse! Non, but you know what he is! You know—there's no more to be said. Here, we've got to rub along with a lot of people that we don't know from Adam. We know 'em and yet we don't know 'em; but that man, if he thinks he can mess me about, he'll find himself up the wrong street! You wait a bit. I'll smash him up one of these days, you'll see!"
Meanwhile the general conversation is resumed, drowning the last twin echoes of the quarrel.
"It's every day alike, alors!" says Paradis to me; "yesterday it was Plaisance who wanted to let Fumex have it heavy on the jaw, about God knows what—a matter of opium pills, I think. First it's one and then it's another that talks of doing some one in. Are we getting to be a lot of wild animals because we look like 'em?"
"Mustn't take them too seriously, these men," Lamuse declares; "they're only kids."
"True enough, seeing that they're men."
The day matures. A little more light has trickled through the mists that enclose the earth. But the sky has remained overcast, and now it dissolves in rain; With a slowness which itself disheartens, the wind brings back its great wet void upon us. The rain-haze makes everything clammy and dull—even the Turkey red of Lamuse's cheeks, and even the orange armor that caparisons Tulacque. The water penetrates to the deep joy with which dinner endowed us, and puts it out. Space itself shrinks; and the sky, which is a field of melancholy, comes closely down upon the earth, which is a field of death.
We are still there, implanted and idle. It will be hard to-day to reach the end of it, to get rid of the afternoon. We shiver in discomfort, and keep shifting our positions, like cattle enclosed.
Cocon is explaining to his neighbor the arrangement and intricacy of our trenches. He has seen a military map and made some calculations. In the sector occupied by our regiment there are fifteen lines of French trenches. Some are abandoned, invaded by grass, and half leveled; the others solidly upkept and bristling with men. These parallels are joined up by innumerable galleries which hook and crook themselves like ancient streets. The system is much more dense than we believe who live inside it. On the twenty-five kilometers' width that form the army front, one must count on a thousand kilometers of hollowed lines—trenches and saps of all sorts. And the French Army consists of ten such armies. There are then, on the French side, about 10,000 kilometers2 of trenches, and as much again on the German side. And the French front is only about one-eighth of the whole war-front of the world.
Thus speaks Cocon, and he ends by saying to his neighbor, "In all that lot, you see what we are, us chaps?"
Poor Barque's head droops. His face, bloodless as a slum child's, is underlined by a red goatee that punctuates his hair like an apostrophe: "Yes, it's true, when you come to think of it. What's a soldier, or even several soldiers?—Nothing, and less than nothing, in the whole crowd; and so we see ourselves lost, drowned, like the few drops of blood that we are among all this flood of men and things."
Barque sighs and is silent, and the end of his discourse gives a chance of hearing to a bit of jingling narrative, told in an undertone: "He was coming along with two horses—Fs-s-s—a shell; and he's only one horse left."
"You get fed up with it," says Volpatte.
"But you stick it," growls Barque.
"You've got to," says Paradis.
"Why?" asks Marthereau, without conviction.
"No need for a reason, as long as we've got to."
"There is no reason," Lamuse avers.
"Yes, there is," says Cocon. "It's—or rather, there are several."
"Shut it up! Much better to have no reason, as long as we've got to stick it."
"All the same," comes the hollow voice of Blaire, who lets no chance slip of airing his pet phrase—"All the same, they'd like to steal the very skin off us!"
"At the beginning of it," says Tirette, "I used to think about a heap of things. I considered and calculated. Now, I don't think any more."
"Nor me either."
"Nor me."
"I've never tried to."
"You're not such a fool as you look, flea-face," says the shrill and jeering voice of Mesnil Andre. Obscurely flattered, the other develops his theme—
"To begin with, you can't know anything about anything."
Says Corporal Bertrand, "There's only one thing you need know, and it's this; that the Boches are here in front of us, deep dug in, and we've got to see that they don't get through, and we've got to put 'em out, one day or another—as soon as possible."
"Oui, oui, they've got to leg it, and no mistake about it. What else is there? Not worth while to worry your head thinking about anything else. But it's a long job."
An explosion of profane assent comes from Fouillade, and he adds, "That's what it is!"
"I've given up grousing," says Barque. "At the beginning of it, I played hell with everybody—with the people at the rear, with the civilians, with the natives, with the shirkers. Yes, I played hell; but that was at the beginning of the war—I was young. Now, I take things better."
"There's only one way of taking 'em—as they come!"
"Of course! Otherwise, you'd go crazy. We're dotty enough already, eh, Firmin?"
Volpatte assents with a nod of profound conviction. He spits, and then contemplates his missile with a fixed and unseeing eye.
"You were saying?" insists Barque.
"Here, you haven't got to look too far in front. You must live from day to day and from hour to hour, as well as you can."
"Certain sure, monkey-face. We've got to do what they tell us to do, until they tell us to go away."
"That's all," yawns Mesnil Joseph.
Silence follows the recorded opinions that proceed from these dried and tanned faces, inlaid with dust. This, evidently, is the credo of the men who, a year and a half ago, left all the corners of the land to mass themselves on the frontier: Give up trying to understand, and give up trying to be yourself. Hope that you will not die, and fight for life as well as you can.
"Do what you've got to do, oui, but get out of your own messes yourself," says Barque, as he slowly stirs the mud to and fro.
"No choice"—Tulacque backs him up. "If you don't get out of 'em yourself, no one'll do it for you."
"He's not yet quite extinct, the man that bothers about the other fellow."
"Every man for himself, in war!"
"That's so, that's so."
Silence. Then from the depth of their destitution, these men summon sweet souvenirs—"All that," Barque goes on, "isn't worth much, compared with the good times we had at Soissons."
"Ah, the Devil!"
A gleam of Paradise lost lights up their eyes and seems even to redden their cold faces.
"Talk about a festival!" sighs Tirloir, as he leaves off scratching himself, and looks pensively far away over Trenchland.
"Ah, nom de Dieu! All that town, nearly abandoned, that used to be ours! The houses and the beds—"
"And the cupboards!"
"And the cellars!"
Lamuse's eyes are wet, his face like a nosegay, his heart full.
"Were you there long?" asks Cadilhac, who came here later, with the drafts from Auvergne.
"Several months."
The conversation had almost died out, but it flames up again fiercely at this vision of the days of plenty.
"We used to see," said Paradis dreamily, "the poilus pouring along and behind the houses on the way back to camp with fowls hung round their middles, and a rabbit under each arm, borrowed from some good fellow or woman that they hadn't seen and won't ever see again."
We reflect on the far-off flavor of chicken and rabbit. "There were things that we paid for, too. The spondu-licks just danced about. We held all the aces in those days."
"A hundred thousand francs went rolling round the shops."
"Millions, oui. All the day, just a squandering that you've no idea of, a sort of devil's delight."
"Believe me or not," said Blaire to Cadilhac, "but in the middle of it all, what we had the least of was fires, just like here and everywhere else you go. You had to chase it and find it and stick to it. Ah, mon vieux, how we did run after the kindlings!"
"Well, we were in the camp of the C.H.R. The cook there was the great Martin Cesar. He was the man for finding wood!"
"Ah, oui, oui! He was the ace of trumps! He got what he wanted without twisting himself."
"Always some fire in his kitchen, young fellow. You saw cooks chasing and gabbling about the streets in all directions, blubbering because they had no coal or wood. But he'd got a fire. When he hadn't any, he said, 'Don't worry, I'll see you through.' And he wasn't long about it, either."
"He went a bit too far, even. The first time I saw him in his kitchen, you'd never guess what he'd got the stew going with! With a violin that he'd found in the house!"
"Rotten, all the same," says Mesnil Andre. "One knows well enough that a violin isn't worth much when it comes to utility, but all the same—"
"Other times, he used billiard cues. Zizi just succeeded in pinching one for a cane, but the rest—into the fire! Then the arm-chairs in the drawing-room went by degrees—mahogany, they were. He did 'em in and cut them up by night, case some N.C.O. had something to say about it."
"He knew his way about," said Pepin. "As for us, we got busy with an old suite of furniture that lasted us a fortnight."
"And what for should we be without? You've got to make dinner, and there's no wood or coal. After the grub's served out, there you are with your jaws empty, with a pile of meat in front of you, and in the middle of a lot of pals that chaff and bullyrag you!"
"It's the War Office's doing, it isn't ours."
"Hadn't the officers a lot to say about the pinching?"
"They damn well did it themselves, I give you my word! Desmaisons, do you remember Lieutenant Virvin's trick, breaking down a cellar door with an ax? And when a poilu saw him at it, he gave him the door for firewood, so that he wouldn't spread it about."
"And poor old Saladin, the transport officer. He was found coming out of a basement in the dusk with two bottles of white wine in each arm, the sport, like a nurse with two pairs of twins. When he was spotted, they made him go back down to the wine-cellar, and serve out bottles for everybody. But Corporal Bertrand, who is a man of scruples, wouldn't have any. Ah, you remember that, do you, sausage-foot!"
"Where's that cook now that always found wood?" asks Cadilhac.
"He's dead. A bomb fell in his stove. He didn't get it, but he's dead all the same—died of shock when he saw his macaroni with its legs in the air. Heart seizure, so the doc' said. His heart was weak—he was only strong on wood. They gave him a proper funeral—made him a coffin out of the bedroom floor, and got the picture nails out of the walls to fasten 'em together, and used bricks to drive 'em in. While they were carrying him off, I thought to myself, 'Good thing for him he's dead. If he saw that, he'd never be able to forgive himself for not having thought of the bedroom floor for his fire.'—Ah, what the devil are you doing, son of a pig?"
Volpatte offers philosophy on the rude intrusion of a passing fatigue party: "The private gets along on the back of his pals. When you spin your yarns in front of a fatigue gang, or when you take the best bit or the best place, it's the others that suffer."
"I've often," says Lamuse, "put up dodges so as not to go into the trenches, and it's come off no end of times. I own up to that. But when my pals are in danger, I'm not a dodger any more. I forget discipline and everything else. I see men, and I go. But otherwise, my boy, I look after my little self."
Lamuse's claims are not idle words. He is an admitted expert at loafing, but all the same he has brought wounded in under fire and saved their lives. Without any brag, he relates the deed—
"We were all lying on the grass, and having a hot time. Crack, crack! Whizz, whizz! When I saw them downed, I got up, though they yelled at me, 'Get down!' Couldn't leave 'em like that. Nothing to make a song about, seeing I couldn't do anything else."
Nearly all the boys of the squad have some high deed of arms to their credit, and the Croix de Guerre has been successively set upon their breasts.
"I haven't saved any Frenchmen," says Biquet, "but I've given some Boches the bitter pill." In the May attacks, he ran off in advance and was seen to disappear in the distance, but came back with four fine fellows in helmets.
"I, too," says Tulacque, "I've killed some." Two months ago, with quaint vanity, he laid out nine in a straight row, in front of the taken trench. "But," he adds, "it's always the Boche officer that I'm after."
"Ah, the beasts!" The curse comes from several men at once and from the bottom of their hearts.
"Ah, mon vieux," says Tirloir, "we talk about the dirty Boche race; but as for the common soldier, I don't know if it's true or whether we're codded about that as well, and if at bottom they're not men pretty much like us."
"Probably they're men like us," says Eudore.
"Perhaps!" cries Cocon, "and perhaps not."
"Anyway," Tirloir goes on, "we've not got a dead set on the men, but on the German officers; non, non, non, they're not men, they're monsters. I tell you, they're really a specially filthy sort o' vermin. One might say that they're the microbes of the war. You ought to see them close to—the infernal great stiff-backs, thin as nails, though they've got calf-heads."
"And snouts like snakes."
Tirloir continues: "I saw one once, a prisoner, as I came back from liaison. The beastly bastard! A Prussian colonel, that wore a prince's crown, so they told me, and a gold coat-of-arms. He was mad because we took leave to graze against him when they were bringing him back along the communication trench, and he looked down on everybody—like that. I said to myself, 'Wait a bit, old cock, I'll make you rattle directly!' I took my time and squared up behind him, and kicked into his tailpiece with all my might. I tell you, he fell down half-strangled."
"Strangled?"
"Yes, with rage, when it dawned on him that the rump of an officer and nobleman had been bust in by the hobnailed socks of a poor private! He went off chattering like a woman and wriggling like an epileptic—"
"I'm not spiteful myself," says Blaire, "I've got kiddies. And it worries me, too, at home, when I've got to kill a pig that I know—but those, I shall run 'em through—Bing!—full in the linen-cupboard."
"I, too."
"Not to mention," says Pepin, "that they've got silver hats, and pistols that you can get four quid for whenever you like, and field-glasses that simply haven't got a price. Ah, bad luck, what a lot of chances I let slip in the early part of the campaign! I was too much of a beginner then, and it serves me right. But don't worry, I shall get a silver hat. Mark my words, I swear I'll have one. I must have not only the skin of one of Wilhelm's red-tabs, but his togs as well. Don't fret yourself; I'll fasten on to that before the war ends."
"You think it'll have an end, then?" asks some one.
"Don't worry!" replies the other.
Meanwhile, a hubbub has arisen to the right of us, and suddenly a moving and buzzing group appears, in which dark and bright forms mingle.
"What's all that?"
Biquet has ventured on a reconnaissance, and returns contemptuously pointing with his thumb towards the motley mass: "Eh, boys! Come and have a squint at them! Some people!"
"Some people?"
"Oui, some gentlemen, look you. Civvies, with Staff officers."
"Civilians! Let's hope they'll stick it!"3
It is the sacramental saying and evokes laughter, although we have heard it a hundred times, and although the soldier has rightly or wrongly perverted the original meaning and regards it as an ironical reflection on his life of privations and peril.
Two Somebodies come up; two Somebodies with overcoats and canes. Another is dressed in a sporting suit, adorned with a plush hat and binoculars. Pale blue tunics, with shining belts of fawn color or patent leather, follow and steer the civilians.
With an arm where a brassard glitters in gold-edged silk and golden ornament, a captain indicates the firing-step in front of an old emplacement and invites the visitors to get up and try it. The gentleman in the touring suit clambers up with the aid of his umbrella.
Says Barque, "You've seen the station-master at the Gare du Nord, all in his Sunday best, and opening the door of a first-class compartment for a rich sportsman on the first day of the shooting? With his 'Montez, monsieur le Propritaire!'—you know, when the toffs are all togged up in brand-new outfits and leathers and ironmongery, and showing off with all their paraphernalia for killing poor little animals!"
Three or four poilus who were quite without their accouterments have disappeared underground. The others sit as though paralyzed. Even the pipes go out, and nothing is heard but the babble of talk exchanged by the officers and their guests.
"Trench tourists," says Barque in an undertone, and then louder—"This way, mesdames et messieurs"—in the manner of the moment.
"Chuck it!" whispers Farfadet, fearing that Barque's malicious tongue will draw the attention of the potent personages.
Some heads in the group are now turned our way. One gentleman who detaches himself and comes up wears a soft hat and a loose tie. He has a white billy-goat beard, and might be an artiste. Another follows him, wearing a black overcoat, a black bowler hat, a black beard, a white tie and an eyeglass.
"Ah, ah! There are some poilus," says the first gentleman. "These are real poilus, indeed."