ill and wait for us. When we are close up,
"It's about time!" cries Volpatte.

"You're wounded, old chap?"--"What?" he says; the manifold bandages all
round his head make him deaf, and we must shout to get through them. So
we go close and shout. Then he replies, "That's nothing; we're coming
from the hole where the 5th Battalion put us on Thursday."

"You've stayed there--ever since?" yells Farfadet, whose shrill and
almost feminine voice goes easily through the quilting that protects
Volpatte's ears.

"Of course we stayed there, you blithering idiot!" says Fouillade. "You
don't suppose we'd got wings to fly away with, and still less that we
should have legged it without orders?"

Both of them let themselves drop to a sitting position on the ground.
Volpatte's head--enveloped in rags with a big knot on the top and the
same dark yellowish stains as his face--looks like a bundle of dirty
linen.

"They forgot you, then, poor devils?"

"Rather!" cries Fouillade, "I should say they did. Four days and four
nights in a shell-hole, with bullets raining down, a hole that stunk
like a cesspool."

"That's right," says Volpatte. "It wasn't an ordinary listening-post
hole, where one comes and goes regularly. It was just a shell-hole,
like any other old shell-hole, neither more nor less. They said to us
on Thursday, 'Station yourselves in there and keep on firing,' they
said. Next day, a liaison chap of the 5th Battalion came and showed his
neb: 'What the hell are you doing there?'--'Why, we're firing. They
told us to fire, so we're firing,' I says. 'If they told us to do it,
there must be some reason at the back of it. We're wanting for them to
tell us to do something else.' The chap made tracks. He looked a bit
uneasy, and suffering from the effects of being bombed. 'It's 22,' he
says."

"To us two," says Fouillade, "there was a loaf of bread and a bucket of
wine that the 18th gave us when they planted us there, and a whole case
of cartridges, my boy. We fired off the cartridges and drank the booze,
but we had sense to keep a few cartridges and a hunch of bread, though
we didn't keep any wine."

"That's where we went wrong," says Volpatte, "seeing that it was a
thirsty job. Say, boys, you haven't got any gargle?"

"I've still nearly half a pint of wine," replies Farfadet. "Give it to
him," says Fouillade, pointing to Volpatte, "seeing that he's been
losing blood. I'm only thirsty."

Volpatte was shivering, and his li