ing. Three men are seen moving in the
bottom of the gloomy trench. Around their extinguished fire in the
dirty excavation they are frightful to see, black and sinister. Rain
and negligence have put their fire out, and the four cooks are looking
at the corpses of brands that are shrouded in ashes and the stumps of
wood whence the flame has flown.

Volpatte staggers up to the group and throws down the black mass that
he had on his shoulder. "I've pulled it out of a dug-out where it won't
show much."

"We have wood," says Blaire, "but we've got to light it. Otherwise, how
are we going to cook this cab-horse?"

"It's a fine piece," wails a dark-faced man, "thin flank. In my belief,
that's the best bit of the beast, the flank."

"Fire?" Volpatte objects, "there are no more matches, no more anything."

"We must have fire," growls Poupardin, whose indistinct bulk has the
proportions of a bear as he rolls and sways in the dark depths of our
cage.

"No two ways about it, we've got to have it," Pepin agrees. He is
coming out of a dug-out like a sweep out of a chimney. His gray mass
emerges and appears, like night upon evening.

"Don't worry; I shall get some," declares Blaire in a concentrated tone
of angry decision. He has not been cook long, and is keen to show
himself quite equal to adverse conditions in the exercise of his
functions.

He spoke as Martin Cesar used to speak when he was alive. His aim is to
resemble the great legendary figure of the cook who always found ways
for a fire, just as others, among the non-coms., would fain imitate
Napoleon.

"I shall go if it's necessary and fetch every bit of wood there is at
Battalion H.Q. I shall go and requisition the colonel's matches--I
shall go--"

"Let's go and forage." Poupardin leads the way. His face is like the
bottom of a saucepan that the fire has gradually befouled. As it is
cruelly cold, he is wrapped up all over. He wears a cape which is half
goatskin and half sheepskin, half brown and half whitish, and this
twofold skin of tints geometrically cut makes him like some strange
occult animal.

Pepin has a cotton cap so soiled and so shiny with grease that it might
be made of black silk. Volpatte, inside his Balaklava and his fleeces,
resembles a walking tree-trunk. A square opening betrays a yellow face
at the top of the thick and heavy bark of the mass he makes, which is
bifurcated by a couple of legs.

"Let's look up the 10th. They've always got the