Under Fire | Page 6

In the corners, heavy shadows are seen forming--human clouds that move and break up. One by one they become recognizable. There is one who comes out hooded with his blanket--a savage, you would say, or rather, the tent of a savage, which walks and sways from side to side. Near by, and heavily framed in knitted wool, a square face is disclosed, yellow-brown as though iodized, and patterned with blackish patches, the nose broken, the eyes of Chinese restriction and red-circled, a little coarse and moist mustache like a greasing-brush.
"There's Volpatte. How goes it, Firmin?"
"It goes, it goes, and it comes," says Volpatte. His heavy and drawling voice is aggravated by hoarseness. He coughs--"My number's up, this time. Say, did you hear it last night, the attack? My boy, talk about a bombardment--something very choice in the way of mixtures!" He sniffles and passes his sleeve under his concave nose. His hand gropes within his greatcoat and his jacket till it finds the skin, and scratches. "I've killed thirty of them in the candle," he growls; "in the big dug-out by the tunnel, mon vieux, there are some like crumbs of metal bread. You can see them running about in the straw like I'm telling you."
"Who's been attacking? The Boches?"
"The Boches and us too--out Vimy way--a counterattack--didn't you hear it?"
"No," the big Lamuse, the ox-man, replies on my account; "I was snoring; but I was on fatigue all night the night before."
"I heard it," declares the little Breton, Biquet; "I slept badly, or rather, didn't sleep. I've got a doss-house all to myself. Look, see, there it is--the damned thing." He points to a trough on the ground level, where on a meager mattress of muck, there is just body-room for one. "Talk about home in a nutshell!" he declares, wagging the rough and rock-hard little head that looks as if it had never been finished. "I hardly snoozed. I'd just got off, but was woke up by the relief of the 129th that went by--not by the noise, but the smell. Ah, all those chaps with their feet on the level with my nose! It woke me up, it gave me nose-ache so."
I knew it. I have often been wakened in the trench myself by the trail of heavy smell in the wake of marching men.
"It was all right, at least, if it killed the vermin," said Tirette.
"On the contrary, it excites them," says Lamuse; "the worse you smell, the more you have of 'em."
"And it's lucky," Biquet went on, "that their stink woke me up. As I was telling that great tub just now, I got my peepers open just in time to seize the tent-cloth that shut my hole up--one of those muck-heaps was going to pinch it off me."
"Dirty devils, the 129th." The human form from which the words came could now be distinguished down below at our feet, where the morning had not yet reached it. Grasping his abundant clothing by handsful, he squatted and wriggled. It was Papa Blaire. His little eyes blinked among the dust that luxuriated on his face. Above the gap of his toothless mouth, his mustache made a heavy sallow lump. His hands were horribly black, the top of them shaggy with dirt, the palms plastered in gray relief. Himself, shriveled and dirtbedight, exhaled the scent of an ancient stewpan. Though busily scratching, he chatted with big Barque, who leaned towards him from a little way off.
"I wasn't as mucky as this when I was a civvy," he said.
"Well, my poor friend, it's a dirty change for the worse," said Barque.
"Lucky for you," says Tirette, going one better; "when it comes to kids, you'll present madame with some little niggers!"
Blaire took offense, and gathering gloom wrinkled his brow. "What have you got to give me lip about, you? What next? It's war-time. As for you, bean-face, you think perhaps the war hasn't changed your phizog and your manners? Look at yourself, monkey-snout, buttock-skin! A man must be a beast to talk as you do." He passed his hand over the dark deposit on his face, which the rains of those days had proved finally indelible, and added, "Besides, if I am as I am, it's my own choosing. To begin with, I have no teeth. The major said to me a long time ago, 'You haven't a single tooth. It's not enough. At your next rest,' he says, 'take a turn round to the estomalogical ambulance.'"
"The tomatological ambulance," corrected Barque.
"Stomatological," Bertrand amended.
"You have all the making of an army cook--you ought to have been one," said Barque.
"My idea, too," retorted Blaire innocently. Some one laughed. The black man got up at the insult. "You give me belly-ache," he said with scorn. "I'm off to the latrines."
When his doubly dark silhouette