“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.