When Barque brings in the harvest of the fry-pan, he announces that our hostess has soldiers at her table—­ambulance men of the machine-guns.  “They thought they were the best off, but it’s us that’s that,” says Fouillade with decision, lolling grandly in the darkness of the narrow and tainted hole where we are just as confusedly heaped together as in a dug-out.  But who would think of making the comparison?

“Vous savez pas,” says Pepin, “the chaps of the 9th, they’re in clover!  An old woman has taken them in for nothing, because of her old man that’s been dead fifty years and was a rifleman once on a time.  Seems she’s even given them a rabbit for nix, and they’re just worrying it jugged.”

“There’s good sorts everywhere.  But the boys of the 9th had famous luck to fall into the only shop of good sorts in the whole village.”

Palmyra comes with the coffee, which she supplies.  She thaws a little, listens to us, and even asks questions in a supercilious way:  “Why do you call the adjutant ’le juteux’?”

Barque replies sententiously, “’Twas ever thus.”

When she has disappeared, we criticize our coffee.  “Talk about clear!  You can see the sugar ambling round the bottom of the glass.”—­“She charges six sous for it.”—­“It’s filtered water.”

The door half opens, and admits a streak of light.  The face of a little boy is defined in it.  We entice him in like a kitten and give him a bit of chocolate.

Then, “My name’s Charlie,” chirps the child.  “Our house, that’s close by.  We’ve got soldiers, too.  We always had them, we had.  We sell them everything they want.  Only, voila, sometimes they get drunk.”

“Tell me, little one, come here a bit,” says Cocon, taking the boy between his knees.  “Listen now.  Your papa, he says, doesn’t he, ‘Let’s hope the war goes on,’ eh?” [note 2]

“Of course,” says the child, tossing his head, “because we’re getting rich.  He says, by the end of May, we shall have got fifty thousand francs.”

“Fifty thousand francs!  Impossible!”

“Yes, yes!” the child insists, stamping, “he said it to mamma.  Papa wished it could be always like that.  Mamma, sometimes, she isn’t sure, because my brother Adolphe is at the front.  But we’re going to get him sent to the rear, and then the war can go on.”

These confidences are disturbed by sharp cries, coming from the rooms of our hosts.  Biquet the mobile goes to inquire.  “It’s nothing,” says he, coming back; “it’s the good man slanging the woman because she doesn’t know how to do things, he says, because she’s made the mustard in a tumbler, and he never heard of such a thing, he says.”

We get up, and leave the strong odor of pipes, wine, and stale coffee in our cave.  As soon as we have crossed the threshold, a heaviness of heat puffs in our faces, fortified by the mustiness of frying that dwells in the kitchen and emerges every time the door is opened.  We pass through legions of flies which, massed on the walls in black hordes, fly abroad in buzzing swarms as we pass:  “It’s beginning again like last year!  Flies outside, lice inside.—­”