Wooden Crosses | Page 2

to go through the simplest acts of everyday existence. Scratching in his flaming bristle beard, he turned his head with a negligent air, and gazed with affected nonchalance at one of the three newcomers, a quite young fellow with a sullen look, beardless or clean-shaven--impossible to tell which--wearing a fine fancy k?pi and laden with a broad satchel made of moleskin.
"He's a real dandy lad, with his little cap like a cat's-meat dish!" scoffed Sulphart first of all half to himself.
Then as the other set down his kit, he discovered the satchel. Then he broke out.
"Hi! old boy!" he exclaimed; "did you have your little game-bag made special to order for going up into the trenches? If you had a stray idea that the Boches wouldn't mark you down as much as you wanted, you might perhaps have brought along a little flag and tootled on a trumpet."
The new chum had straightened himself up, annoyed, with a frown making a bar across his obstinate little forehead. But all at once, put out of countenance by the jeering attitude of the old hand, he turned his head away and started to blush. The redhead was quite satisfied with his flattering success for his joke. He descended from his lofty throne, and, just to prove that he had no intention of savaging a comrade who was not responsible, he shifted his strictures higher up to the military powers whose every act and deed, according to him, were dictated by pure foolishness and a manifest desire to harass the soldier-man.
"I'm not saying this for you--you don't know any better yet--but those idiots that make you rub the dixies up with sabre-paste so that they may shine better. Do you fancy they don't all deserve to be shot?... Do they think we don't make a good enough target without that? Here, chuck us over your bag. I'll blacken it with burnt cork, and will run your bottles, your dixies, and the whole bag o' tricks through straw smoke--there's nothing better than that."
Lemoine, who was never more than a single pace away from Sulphart, shrugged his shoulders slowly.
"You're never going to drive these poor blighters daft already with your flash patter," said he reproachfully in his slow, dragging voice. "Let them alone, anyway, till they at least get well off the train."
The newcomer of the white satchel had taken his seat on a wheelbarrow. He seemed quite exhausted. Black runnels of sweat had traced bracketing lines from his temples to the lower part of his cheeks. He unrolled his puttees but did not venture to take off his boots--fine shooting-boots with extra wide welts.
"My heel is all skinned," he said to me. "My boot must be full of blood. I'm carrying such a weight."
Lemoine weighed his kit.
"That's a heavy one for sure," said he. "What on earth have you managed to bung into it?... Have you been putting in paving-stones?"
"Just what I was told to put in."
"It's the cartridges that weigh heavy," put in the corporal. "How many did they give you?"
"Two hundred and fifty.... but I haven't got them in my pack."
"Where are they, then?"
"In my satchel. You see, I like it better like that. Suppose we were attacked all of a sudden."
"Attacked?"
The others stared at him in amazement. Then they all started to laugh with one accord, a huge laugh that they exaggerated still further, stifling, gesticulating, exchanging heavy slaps on the shoulder like caresses delivered with washerwomen's beetles.
"Attacked.... that's what he said! There's a bloke that's got them again!..."
"No, no. He's got the wind up..."
"Attacked, that's what he said.... He's crazy.... Put the dogs on him!..."
This vast candour made us laugh till we were like to choke. Papa Hamel laughed till he cried. Fouillard, for his part, was not laughing. He shrugged his shoulders, hostile all at once, already looking askance at this soldier who was much too clean and who spoke much too politely.
"A lad with dibs who means to come them over us," said he to Sulphart.
The redhead, bent only on talking more than anybody else, was considering the newcomer with compassion.
"But, my poor lad," said he, "you don't really suppose we are fighting that way now? That was all right for the first month. We don't fight any more now--maybe you'll never be fighting."
"Sure enough," said Lemoine, backing him up, "you won't fight; but you'll jabber about it all the same."
"You'll never fire a cartridge," prophesied Broucke, the ch'timi with the child's eyes.
The newcomer made no answer, doubtless thinking that the old hands were trying to pull his leg. But with his ear cocked, instead of listening to Sulphart's discourse, he was hearkening to the big gun shaking the very sky with its big bellow, and he would fain have been over there already, on the far side of