Wooden Crosses | Page 4

brief moment of stupefied wonder, and then a wild clamour greeted them.
"Hurrah for the wedding!" yelled Fouillard first of all.
The others yelled and shouted louder, and the whole squad, howling with delight, surrounded the two figures of fun. Sulphart had pulled on over his red trousers a pretty pair of lady's drawers trimmed with lace, that showed his broad crimson behind through its opening. He had donned a kind of white dressing-jacket, and on his bristling collier's head he had set a bridal wreath all awry, made of slightly yellowing orange-blossom--the wreath of the lawyer's wife, that had been reposing under a glass shade. Lemoine, who was not laughing, but had rather the careworn look of a soldier on duty, had been satisfied with a Scotch kilt, a free-and-easy get-up whose regrettable lack of reticence he subdued by a frock-coat with satin lapels, and an orthodox tall hat that had been sedulously brushed the wrong way as a preliminary.
Little Broucke, in a state of happy amaze, was prancing behind them as if he was at a village festival.
"I'm off to the wedding!" he cried.
Singing and shouting, everybody started to dance, accompanied by Fouillard, who fancied he was providing music by banging on the black bottom of his pot with a bayonet hilt.
"Hurrah for the bride!" we all repeated in chorus.
Br?val's thin face was widened by a happy grin. All the same, he was trying to quiet us down.
"Not so loud! Good Lord! one of the officers will hear you."
Vairon had taken Sulphart round the waist, and was dancing a java with all the airs and graces of a village hop; while Lemoine, imagining himself at the local fte, was cutting pigeon's-wings and clapping his hobnailed heels together.
"And the feast goes on. Hurrah for the Mayor!" yelled the cook, who was vainly trying to wash his black hands by rubbing them in his perspiring forehead.
They were hopping one behind the other, like a farandole, and laughing like urchins. The new chum followed at the tail, halting and tripping, holding on to Lagny by the hood. Sulphart, with his mouth dry as ashes, was the first to break away from the ring.
"Good lord, we're choking here! And that other joker who isn't coming back with the wine. So long as he doesn't let Morache grab him."
The thought of such a catastrophe halted the dancers.
"And now would be just the moment for a cherry drink," mourned Vairon.
"But someone else can go and buy more," said Demachy, producing two further notes. "I've laughed too much, I could do very well with a drink."
Respectfully or jealously, all the comrades looked on as the new chum opened his purse of fine leather, and Broucke was so overcome that he said, "Thank you," when he took the money.
Fouillard, who had forgotten all about his stew, had flung himself down on all fours before his blackened fire, and was puffing and blowing with might and main on the ashes, without raising a single spark out of them.
"Go and get some paper," he begged; "this bitch of wet wood won't catch."
Somebody made his way down into the cellar and brought up a pile of many-coloured papers, which he flung down near the fireplace. Stray leaves flew about, white and blue, mostly of the same shape and size. They were the notary's papers. The flame as it flickered up made them flutter, and for a moment it seemed as though there could be deciphered, even in the fire itself, the fine round legal script and the insertions of peasant handwriting.
"I think that's a bit thick, I do," said Lemoine in his simple voice. "Those are things that should be kept.... Suppose somebody was burning my old folk's bits of paper for their land; I'd have him behind bars for it."
"Shut your jaw!" coughed Fouillard out of the smoke. "It was you yourself that wouldn't let the door be burned, and made us go and hunt for this filthy rubbish of green wood that won't catch. As if it wasn't wartime!"
"For sure it's wartime," said little B?lin approvingly. He had planned to make himself a waistcoat out of a frock-coat, and was very carefully cutting away the skirts.
"That's true, we are making war," repeated the new chum, clinking glasses with Broucke.
And looking at Sulphart in his drawers of fine lawn, he began to laugh.
"Nobody would think of it," said he. "There's lots of fun up at the front. I was certain I wouldn't be nearly as bored as in barracks."
Br?val, whose hollow face had resumed his two deep lines of anguish down his cheeks, looked at him and shook his head.
"You don't suppose that it's like this every day, do you? You'd be very far out if you did, you know."
His nose buried in his cup, Fouillard was guffawing. Sulphart the