"Some of us want to sleep! Shut them up, you lot of louts!" cries
Mesnil Joseph from his litter.

This entreaty has a subduing effect for a moment, but does not stop the
burble of voices nor the passing to and fro.

"We're going up to-morrow, it's true," says Paradis, "and in the
evening we shall go into the first line. But nobody's thinking about
it. We know it, and that's all."

Gradually each has regained his place. I have stretched myself on the
straw, and Marthereau wraps himself up by my side.

Enter an enormous bulk, taking great pains not to make a noise. It is
the field-hospital sergeant, a Marist Brother, a huge bearded simpleton
in spectacles. When he has taken off his greatcoat and appears in his
jacket, you are conscious that he feels awkward about showing his legs.
We see that it hurries discreetly, this silhouette of a bearded
hippopotamus. He blows, sighs, and mutters.

Marthereau indicates him with a nod of his bead, and says to me, "Look
at him. Those chaps have always got to be talking fudge. When we ask
him what he does in civil life, he won't say 'I'm a school teacher' he
says, leering at you from under his specs with the half of his eyes,
'I'm a professor.' When he gets up very early to go to mass, he says,
'I've got belly-ache, I must go and take a turn round the corner and no
mistake.'"

A little farther off, Papa Ramure is talking of his homeland: "Where I
live, it's just a bit of a hamlet, no great shakes. There's my old man
there, seasoning pipes all day long; whether he's working or resting,
he blows his smoke up to the sky or into the smoke of the stove."

I listen to this rural idyll, and it takes suddenly a specialized and
technical character: "That's why he makes a paillon. D'you know what a
paillon is? You take a stalk of green corn and peel it. You split it in
two and then in two again, and you have different sizes. Then with a
thread and the four slips of straw, he goes round the stem of his
pipe--"

The lesson ceases abruptly, there being no apparent audience.

There are only two candles alight. A wide wing of darkness overspreads
the prostrate collection of men.

Private conversation still flickers along the primitive dormitory, and
some fragments of it reach my ears. Just now, Papa Ramure is abusing
the commandant.

"The commandant, old man, with his four bits of gold string, I've
noticed he don't know how to smoke. He sucks all out at his pipes, and
he burns 'em. It