l the same," murmurs some one who is eating in a corner, "this
Camembert, it cost twenty-five sous, but you talk about muck! Outside
there's a layer of sticky glue, and inside it's plaster that breaks."

Meanwhile Tirette relates the outrages inflicted on him during his
twenty-one days of training owing to the quarrelsome temper of a
certain major: "A great hog he was, my boy, everything rotten on this
earth. All the lot of us looked foul when he went by or when we saw him
in the officers' room spread out on a chair that you couldn't see
underneath him, with his vast belly and huge cap, and circled round
with stripes from top to bottom, like a barrel--he was hard on the
private! They called him Loeb--a Boche, you see!"

"I knew him!" cried Paradis; "when war started he was declared unfit
for active service, naturally. While I was doing my term he was a
dodger already--but he dodged round all the street corners to pinch
you--you got a day's clink for an unbuttoned button, and he gave it you
over and above if there was some bit of a thing about you that wasn't
quite O.K.--and everybody laughed. He thought they were laughing at
you, and you knew they were laughing at him, but you knew it in vain,
you were in it up to your head for the clink."

"He had a wife," Tirette goes on, "the old--"

"I remember her, too," Paradis exclaimed. "You talk about a bitch!"

"Some of 'em drag a little pug-dog about with 'em, but him, he trailed
that yellow minx about everywhere, with her broom-handle hips and her
wicked look. It was her that worked the old sod up against us. He was
more stupid than wicked, but as soon as she was there he got more
wicked than stupid. So you bet they were some nuisance--"

Just then, Marthereau wakes up from his sleep by the entry with a
half-groan. He straightens himself up, sitting on his straw like a
gaol-bird, and we see his bearded silhouette take the vague outline of
a Chinese, while his round eye rolls and turns in the shadows. He is
looking at his dreams of a moment ago. Then he passes his hand over his
eyes and--as if it had some connection with his dream--recalls the
scene that night when we came up to the trenches--"For all that," he
says, in a voice weighty with slumber and reflection, "there were some
half-seas-over that night! Ah, what a night! All those troops,
companies and whole regiments, yelling and surging all the way up the
road! In the thinnest of the dark you could see the jumble o