Cocon and Tirette are recalling their memories of barrack-life.  The impressions left upon their minds by those years of military training are ineffaceable.  Into that fund of abundant souvenirs, of abiding color and instant service, they have been wont to dip for their subjects of conversation for ten, fifteen, or twenty years.  So that they still frequent it, even after a year and a half of actual war in all its forms.

I can hear some of the talk and guess the rest of it.  For it is everlastingly the same sort of tale that they get out of their military past;—­the narrator once shut up a bad-tempered N.C.O. with words of extreme appropriateness and daring.  He wasn’t afraid, he spoke out loud and strong!  Some scraps of it reach my ears—­

“Alors, d’you think I flinched when Nenoeil said that to me?  Not a bit, my boy.  All the pals kept their jaws shut but me; I spoke up, ‘Mon adjudant,’ I says, ‘it’s possible, but—­’” A sentence follows that I cannot secure—­“Oh, tu sais, just like that, I said it.  He didn’t get shirty; ‘Good, that’s good,’ he says as he hops it, and afterwards he was as good as all that, with me.”

“Just like me, with Dodore, ’jutant of the 13th, when I was on leave—­a mongrel.  Now he’s at the Pantheon, as caretaker.  He’d got it in for me, so—­”

So each unpacks his own little load of historical anecdote.  They are all alike, and not one of them but says, “As for me, I am not like the others.”

* * * * * *

The post-orderly!  He is a tall and broad man with fat calves; comfortable looking, and as neat and tidy as a policeman.  He is in a bad temper.  There are new orders, and now he has to go every day as far as Battalion Headquarters.  He abuses the order as if it had been directed exclusively against himself; and he continues to complain even while he calls up the corporals for the post and maintains his customary chat en passant with this man and that.  And in spite of his spleen he does not keep to himself all the information with which he comes provided.  While removing the string from the letter-packets he dispenses his verbal news, and announces first, that according to rumor, there is a very explicit ban on the wearing of hoods.

“Hear that?” says Tirette to Tirloir.  “Got to chuck your fine hood away!”

“Not likely!  I’m not on.  That’s nothing to do with me,” replies the hooded one, whose pride no less than his comfort is at stake.

“Order of the General Commanding the Army.”

“Then let the General give an order that it’s not to rain any more.  I want to know nothing about it.”

The majority of Orders, even when less peculiar than this one, are always received in this way—­and then carried out.

“There’s a reported order as well,” says the man of letters, “that beards have got to be trimmed and hair got to be clipped close.”

“Talk on, my lad,” says Barque, on whose head the threatened order directly falls; “you didn’t see me!  You can draw the curtains!”