Just as we emerge from the wood, slipping and floundering, to penetrate the region of communication trenches, two faint shadows are outlined in front.  Two soldiers are coming up.  We can see the protuberance of their burdens and the sharp lines of their rifles.  The swaying double shape becomes distinct—­“It’s them!”

One of the shadows has a great white head, all swathed—­“One of them’s wounded!  It’s Volpatte!”

We run up to the specters, our feet making the sounds of sinking in sponge and of sticky withdrawal, and our shaken cartridges rattle in their pouches.  They stand still and wait for us.  When we are close up, “It’s about time!” cries Volpatte.

“You’re wounded, old chap?”—­“What?” he says; the manifold bandages all round his head make him deaf, and we must shout to get through them.  So we go close and shout.  Then he replies, “That’s nothing; we’re coming from the hole where the 5th Battalion put us on Thursday.”

“You’ve stayed there—­ever since?” yells Farfadet, whose shrill and almost feminine voice goes easily through the quilting that protects Volpatte’s ears.

“Of course we stayed there, you blithering idiot!” says Fouillade.  “You don’t suppose we’d got wings to fly away with, and still less that we should have legged it without orders?”

Both of them let themselves drop to a sitting position on the ground.  Volpatte’s head—­enveloped in rags with a big knot on the top and the same dark yellowish stains as his face—­looks like a bundle of dirty linen.

“They forgot you, then, poor devils?”

“Rather!” cries Fouillade, “I should say they did.  Four days and four nights in a shell-hole, with bullets raining down, a hole that stunk like a cesspool.”

“That’s right,” says Volpatte.  “It wasn’t an ordinary listening-post hole, where one comes and goes regularly.  It was just a shell-hole, like any other old shell-hole, neither more nor less.  They said to us on Thursday, ‘Station yourselves in there and keep on firing,’ they said.  Next day, a liaison chap of the 5th Battalion came and showed his neb:  ’What the hell are you doing there?’—­’Why, we’re firing.  They told us to fire, so we’re firing,’ I says.  ’If they told us to do it, there must be some reason at the back of it.  We’re wanting for them to tell us to do something else.’  The chap made tracks.  He looked a bit uneasy, and suffering from the effects of being bombed.  ‘It’s 22,’ he says.”

“To us two,” says Fouillade, “there was a loaf of bread and a bucket of wine that the 18th gave us when they planted us there, and a whole case of cartridges, my boy.  We fired off the cartridges and drank the booze, but we had sense to keep a few cartridges and a hunch of bread, though we didn’t keep any wine.”

“That’s where we went wrong,” says Volpatte, “seeing that it was a thirsty job.  Say, boys, you haven’t got any gargle?”

“I’ve still nearly half a pint of wine,” replies Farfadet.  “Give it to him,” says Fouillade, pointing to Volpatte, “seeing that he’s been losing blood.  I’m only thirsty.”