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.