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.