The “tin hat” gives a certain sameness to the highest points of the beings that are there, but even then the divers ways of wearing it—­on the regulation cap like Biquet, over a Balaklava like Cadilhac, or on a cotton cap like Barque—­produce a complicated diversity of appearance.

And our legs!  I went down just now, bent double, into our dug-out, the little low cave that smells musty and damp, where one stumbles over empty jam-pots and dirty rags, where two long lumps lay asleep, while in the corner a kneeling shape rummaged a pouch by candle-light.  As I climbed out, the rectangle of entry afforded me a revelation of our legs.  Flat on the ground, vertically in the air, or aslant; spread about, doubled up, or mixed together; blocking the fairway and cursed by passers-by, they present a collection of many colors and many shapes—­gaiters, leggings black or yellow, long or short, in leather, in tawny cloth, in any sort of waterproof stuff; puttees in dark blue, light blue, black, sage green, khaki, and beige.  Alone of all his kind, Volpatte has retained the modest gaiters of mobilization.  Mesnil Andre has displayed for a fortnight a pair of thick woolen stockings, ribbed and green; and Tirette has always been known by his gray cloth puttees with white stripes, commandeered from a pair of civilian trousers that was hanging goodness knows where at the beginning of the war.  As for Marthereau’s puttees, they are not both of the same hue, for he failed to find two fag-ends of greatcoat equally worn and equally dirty, to be cut up into strips.

There are legs wrapped up in rags, too, and even in newspapers, which are kept in place with spirals of thread or—­much more practical—­telephone wire.  Pepin fascinated his friends and the passers-by with a pair of fawn gaiters, borrowed from a corpse.  Barque, who poses as a resourceful man, full of ideas—­and Heaven knows what a bore it makes of him at times!—­has white calves, for he wrapped surgical bandages round his leg-cloths to preserve them, a snowy souvenir at his latter end of the cotton cap at the other, which protrudes below his helmet and is left behind in its turn by a saucy red tassel.  Poterloo has been walking about for a month in the boots of a German soldier, nearly new, and with horseshoes on the heels.  Caron entrusted them to Poterloo when he was sent back on account of his arm.  Caron had taken them himself from a Bavarian machine-gunner, knocked out near the Pylones road.  I can hear Caron telling about it yet—­

“Old man, he was there, his buttocks in a hole, doubled up, gaping at the sky with his legs in the air, and his pumps offered themselves to me with an air that meant they were worth my while.  ’A tight fit,’ says I. But you talk about a job to bring those beetle-crushers of his away!  I worked on top of him, tugging, twisting and shaking, for half an hour and no lie about it.  With his feet gone quite stiff, the patient didn’t help me a bit.  Then at last the legs of it—­they’d been pulled about so—­came unstuck at the knees, and his breeks tore away, and all the lot came, flop!  There was me, all of a sudden, with a full boot in each fist.  The legs and feet had to be emptied out.”