Wooden Crosses | Page 6

straw. To keep his feet warm, he slipped them into the sleeves of his vest; then he rolled himself up into his wide blanket folded in two, and very neatly, like a fisherman casting his drag-net, he threw his overcoat over his legs. By that time there was nothing to be seen but a little patch of a highly satisfied face through the opening of the knitted mountain-helmet. B?lin had retired for the night.
Demachy had watched every move, but not with the same admiration as I had; rather in dismay. Then he looked at the others getting ready for the night, with stupor, a kind of culminating terror. At the third who started to take off his boots, he sat upright on his little corner of straw.
"But you surely won't keep everything shut up here!" he exclaimed. "At least you'll be leaving the door open?"
The others looked at him in astonishment.
"No, indeed; you must be hot stuff," growled Fouillard. "The door open! Do you want us to perish of cold?"
The thought of sleeping there, huddled on straw with these unwashed fellows, disgusted him, terrified him. He dared not say so, but in a panic he watched his next neighbour, Fouillard, who, having methodically and slowly unrolled his muddy puttees, was pulling off his heavy boots.
"But it's really most unwholesome, you know," he insisted; "besides, there's this fresh straw. It ferments.... There have been cases of suffocation, often.... That's been known...."
"Don't worry about suffocation."
The others were ready to sleep, lying close to keep themselves warm; Sulphart was trying to reach his boot to knock over the candle that was guttering at its last gasp. Overwhelmed, the new chum said no more. On his knees before the manger, as though he were praying to the god of cattle, he fell to hunting for a flask in his satchel.
"'Ware smash!" cried Sulphart, and his big shoe neatly thrown, swept the candle off to the dark.
"Good-night, everybody."
Demachy, feeling and fumbling, rolled himself up awkwardly in his blanket, and with his face entrenched in his handkerchief well sprinkled with eau-de-Cologne, he lay without moving.
The perfume quickly spread throughout the stable. First of all Vairon uttered his astonishment.
"But there's a smell! What on earth is it?"
"It stinks like a barber."
"That's because we're going to be suffocated," jeered Fouillard, who had tumbled to what was happening.
And turning over on his left side, so as not to catch the smell, he grumbled.
"He's got all that goes to a tart, that blighter!"
The new chum made no answer. The others held their tongues, wholly indifferent. Near us sleep was about to spread his brooding wings over everything. Nevertheless, in the darkness there were voices still running on.
"That makes fifteen days now that she hasn't written to me," confided Br?val to a pal. "She's never been so long as that before.... That simply torments me, you know."
One of the newcomers was questioning Vairon, whose rich public-house voice I recognized.
"When you go into rest-camp you're well received, eh?"
"Oo, well, they don't prod us with pitchforks, anyway; that's about all there is to it."
Sulphart, to send himself to sleep, was softly blackguarding Lemoine, who had promised to find some rum and had come back empty-handed.
"You'll show me the way to ferret out good places, you with the face fit to crush rice," he was mumbling. "Talk about an egg.... a billiard-ball...."
Sleep bore them away, one after another, mingling their breathing, measured or irregular, the even respiration of a child and the outcries of troubled dreaming.
Outside, the night lay in wait, hearkening to the trenches. This evening they were quiet. You could hear neither the dull, all-shaking sound of the cannon, nor the dry cracking of rifle-fire. Only a machine gun was firing, round after round, without hate; you would have said a madhouse wife beating her carpet. Round about the village lay the heavy silence that broods over a freezing countryside. But suddenly, on the roadways, a deep rumbling awoke, increased, thickened, rolled towards us, and the walls began to shake.... The service lorries.
They rolled on heavily, with a jolting clamour of ironmongery. How I would have liked to go to sleep with that familiar rolling roar in my ears and in my soul! Not so long ago the motorbusses passed like that under my windows and held me awake, late, late into the night. How I loathed them in those days! And now, without holding any grudge, they had nevertheless come to see me in my exile. As once upon a time, they made me start and quiver, half asleep and half awake, and I felt the walls shiver and tremble. They were coming to cradle me to sleep.
"It's queer, to-night there's no sound of their hard jolting on the pavement, nor rattling windows, nor belated passers-by calling them to stop. Their