"Ass!" comes the chorus. "Within reach of passing soldiers! Not dotty,
are you?"

"It's hard lines all the same," wails Tirloir. Then suddenly a fit of
rage seizes him, his face crumples, his little fists clench in fury, he
tightens them like knots in string and waves them about. "Alors quoi?
Ah, if I had hold of the mongrel that did it! Talk about breaking his
jaw--I'd stave in his bread-pan, I'd--there was a whole Camembert in
there, I'll go and look for it." He massages his stomach with the
little sharp taps of a guitar player, and plunges into the gray of the
morning, grinning yet dignified, with his awkward outlines of an
invalid in a dressing-gown. We hear him grumbling until he disappears.

"Strange man, that," says Pepin; the others chuckle. "He's daft and
crazy," declares Marthereau, who is in the habit of fortifying the
expression of his thought by using two synonyms at once.

* * * * *

"Tiens, old man," says Tulacque, as he comes up. "Look at this."

Tulacque is magnificent. He is wearing a lemon-yellow coat made out of
an oilskin sleeping-sack. He has arranged a hole in the middle to get
his head through, and compelled his shoulder-straps and belt to go over
it. He is tall and bony. He holds his face in advance as he walks, a
forceful face, with eyes that squint. He has something in his hand. "I
found this while digging last night at the end of the new gallery to
change the rotten gratings. It took my fancy off-hand, that
knick-knack. It's an old pattern of hatchet."

It was indeed an old pattern, a sharpened flint hafted with an old
brown bone--quite a prehistoric tool in appearance.

"Very handy," said Tulacque, fingering it. "Yes, not badly thought out.
Better balanced than the regulation ax. That'll be useful to me, you'll
see." As he brandishes that ax of Post-Tertiary Man, he would himself
pass for an ape-man, decked out with rags and lurking in the bowels of
the earth.

One by one we gathered, we of Bertrand's squad and the half-section, at
an elbow of the trench. Just here it is a little wider than in the
straight part where when you meet another and have to pass you must
throw yourself against the side, rub your back in the earth and your
stomach against the stomach of the other.

Our company occupies, in reserve, a second line parallel. No night
watchman works here. At night we are ready for making earthworks in
front, but as long as the day lasts we have no