he
manner of a life-belt.

"What is there to eat?"

"It's there," is the evasive reply of the second fatigue man, whom
experience has taught that a proclamation of the menu always evokes the
bitterness of disillusion. So they set themselves to panting abuse of
the length and the difficulties of the trip they have just
accomplished: "Some crowds about, everywhere! It's a tough job to get
along--got to disguise yourself as a cigarette paper, sometimes."--"And
there are people who say they're shirkers in the kitchens!" As for him,
he would a hundred thousand times rather be with the company in the
trenches, to mount guard and dig, than earn his keep by such a job,
twice a day during the night!

Paradis, having lifted the lids of the jars, surveys the recipients and
announces, "Kidney beans in oil, bully, pudding, and coffee--that's
all."

"Nom de Dieu!" bawls Tulacque. "And wine?" He summons the crowd: "Come
and look here, all of you! That--that's the limit! We're done out of
our wine!"

Athirst and grimacing, they hurry up; and from the profoundest depths
of their being wells up the chorus of despair and disappointment, "Oh,
Hell!"

"Then what's that in there?" says the fatigue man, still ruddily
sweating, and using his foot to point at a bucket.

"Yes," says Paradis, "my mistake, there is some."

The fatigue man shrugs his shoulders, and hurls at Paradis a look of
unspeakable scorn--"Now you're beginning! Get your gig-lamps on, if
your sight's bad." He adds, "One cup each--rather less perhaps--some
chucklehead bumped against me, coming through the Boyau du Bois, and a
drop got spilled." "Ah!" he hastens to add, raising his voice, "if I
hadn't been loaded up, talk about the boot-toe he'd have got in the
rump! But he hopped it on his top gear, the brute!"

In spite of this confident assurance, the fatigue man makes off
himself, curses overtaking him as he goes, maledictions charged with
offensive reflections on his honesty and temperance, imprecations
inspired by this revelation of a ration reduced.

All the same, they throw themselves on the food, and eat it standing,
squatting, kneeling, sitting on tins, or on haversacks pulled out of
the holes where they sleep--or even prone, their backs on the ground,
disturbed by passers-by, cursed at and cursing. Apart from these
fleeting insults and jests, they say nothing, the primary and universal
interest being but to swallow, with their mouths and the circumference