bread, and the wine. I give them to you so that you can enjoy
them by yourself, my boy. As for them, we have given them enough,' she
says.

"Poor Mariette," sighs Eudore. "Fifteen months since I'd seen her. And
when shall I see her again? Ever?--It was jolly, that idea of hers. She
crammed all that stuff into my bag--"

He half opens his brown canvas pouch.

"Look, here they are! The ham here, and the bread, and there's the
booze. Well, seeing it's there, you don't know what we're going to do
with it? We're going to share it out between us, eh, old pals?"

IX

The Anger of Volpatte

WHEN Volpatte arrived from his sick-leave, after two months' absence,
we surrounded him. But he was sullen and silent, and tried to get away.

"Well, what about it? Volpatte, have you nothing to tell us?"

"Tell us all about the hospital and the sick-leave, old cock, from the
day when you set off in your bandages, with your snout in parenthesis!
You must have seen something of the official shops. Speak then, nome de
Dieu!"

"I don't want to say anything at all about it," said Volpatte.

"What's that? What are you talking about?"

"I'm fed up--that's what I am! The people back there, I'm sick of
them--they make me spew, and you can tell 'em so!"

"What have they done to you?"

"A lot of sods, they are!" says Volpatte.

There he was, with his head as of yore, his ears "stuck on again" and
his Mongolian cheekbones--stubbornly set in the middle of the puzzled
circle that besieged him; amid we felt that the mouth fast closed on
ominous silence meant high pressure of seething exasperation in the
depth of him.

Some words overflowed from him at last. He turned round--facing towards
the rear and the bases--and shook his fist at infinite space. "There
are too many of them," he said between his teeth, "there are too many!"
He seemed to be threatening and repelling a rising sea of phantoms.

A little later, we questioned him again, knowing well that his anger
could not thus be retained within, and that the savage silence would
explode at the first chance.

It was in a deep communication trench, away back, where we had come
together for a meal after a morning spent in digging. Torrential rain
was falling. We were muddled and drenched and hustled by the flood, and
we ate standing in single file, without shelter, under the dissolving
sky. Only by feats of skill could we protect the bread and bully from
the spouts that flowed