. Fouillade, master of his time to-day,
being on neither guard nor fatigues, decides. He lights a taper to seek
among his belongings, and unwinds the coils of his comforter, and we
see his emaciated shape, sculptured in black relief, folding and
refolding it.

"Potato fatigue, inside there, my little lambs!" a sonorous voice
bellows at the door. The hooded shape from which it comes is Sergeant
Henriot. He is a malignant sort of simpleton, and though all the while
joking in clumsy sympathy he supervises the evacuation of quarters with
a sharp eye for the evasive malingerer.

Outside, on the streaming road in the perpetual rain, the second
section is scattered, also summoned and driven to work by the adjutant.
The two sections mingle together. We climb the street and the hillock
of clayey soil where the traveling kitchen is smoking.

"Now then, my lads, get on with it; it isn't a long job when everybody
sets to--Come--what have you got to grumble about, you? That does no
good."

Twenty minutes later we return at a trot. As we grope about in the
barn, we cannot touch anything but what is sodden and cold, and the
sour smell of wet animals is added to the vapor of the liquid manure
that our beds contain.

We gather again, standing, around the props that hold the barn up, and
around the rills that fall vertically from the holes in the roof--faint
columns which rest on vague bases of splashing water. "Here we are
again!" we cry.

Two lumps in turn block the doorway, soaked with the rain that drains
from them--Lamuse and Barque, who have been in quest of a brasier, and
now return from the expedition empty-handed, sullen and vicious. "Not a
shadow of a fire-bucket, and what's more, no wood or coal either, not
for a fortune." It is impossible to have any fire. "If I can't get any,
no one can," says Barque, with a pride which a hundred exploits justify.

We stay motionless, or move slowly in the little space we have, aghast
at so much misery. "Whose is the paper?"

"It's mine," says Becuwe.

"What does it say? Ah, zut, one can't read in this darkness!"

"It says they've done everything necessary now for the soldiers, to
keep them warm in the trenches. They've got all they want, and blankets
and shirts and brasiers and fire-buckets and bucketsful of coal; and
that it's like that in the first-line trenches."

"Ah, damnation!" growl some of the poor prisoners of the barn, and they
shake their fists at the emptiness with