Wooden Crosses | Page 7

noise is no more than a snoring purr inside my drowsy head. They grind, they bump, they are gone.... Adieu, Paris!"
CHAPTER II
IN THE SWEAT OF THY BROW

WITH a great pile of packets in front of him like a pedlar's pack, the harassed quartermaster was calling out the post in the middle of a regular mob of soldiers, who were all plying their elbows and trampling on one another's feet. It was just at our door, between the the communal washhouse--so tiny that there would hardly have been room for three washerwomen under its sloping shelter roof--and the notary's house, which wore a red scarf of virginia creeper crosswise on its front. We had clambered up on the stone seat and were listening attentively.
"Maurice Duclou, first section."
"Killed at Courcy," cried somebody.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, his mates saw him fall in front of the church.... He'd caught a bullet. Now, . . well, I wasn't there myself."
On the corner of the envelope the quartermaster wrote in pencil, "Killed."
"Edouard Marquette."
"He must be killed too," said a voice.
"You're a ninny!" protested another. "The night they said he was dropped he went on a water-party with me."
"Then," asked the quartermaster, "he would be in hospital? But we've not had his papers.
"My idea is that he was evacuated by another regiment."
"No, no, he was wounded; the Boches must have collared him."
"It's a great pity--it's always the ones that have seen nothing have most chat."
Everybody was talking at once in an uproar of opposing statements and insulting contradictions. The quartermaster, hard-pushed and in a hurry, brought them into agreement.
"I don't give a curse. I'll mark him off 'Missing.' Andr? Brunet, thirteenth squad."
"Here for him."
The others were going on disputing in lowered tones; the men in the hindmost ranks were shouting to them to be quiet, and nobody could hear anything. Br?val listened through it all, anxiously listened, and when a name sounded like his, had it repeated.
"Isn't it for me, this time? Corporal Br?val?"
But it was never for him, and turning his poor vexed face to us, he explained.
"She writes so badly that there might be nothing queer about it, eh?"
As the heap lessened his lips tightened. When the last one was called out, he went away, heart and hands empty alike. Just as he was going indoors he turned to us.
"By the way, Demachy, your turn on fatigue. You will take a bag and go to fetch the rations."
"What? The new chum going for rations!... You're making game of us."
And Sulphart, all indignant, left his particular group of pals to come up to the corporal.
"A lad that's just come, who fancies that carrots grow at the fruiterer's, that's the best you can find to send for the rations! Ah, you're up to tricks.... If every fool could swim you wouldn't need a boat to cross the Seine."
"If you want to go I'm not hindering you," replied Br?val calmly.
"Sure, I'll go," shouted Sulphart. "I'll go because I don't want the squad to get the same food as wooden horses, and because that lad looks to me as if he could choose a bit of beef about as well as I could say a Mass."
Demachy, who ever since he arrived had been overwhelmed by the cries, the noisy demands, and brutal gaities of the redhead, made an attempt to rehabilitate himself.
"I beg your pardon, I assure you that I shall know what to do very well. In barracks..."
He was going the wrong way about it. The mere words "active service" or "barracks" was enough to send Sulphart crazy, inasmuch as he had spent his three years in stubbornly defending the cause of right against vindictive Adjutants and officers of malevolent nature, who preferably sent good soldiers to sleep in the police station the night before leave. Anger choked him.
"Barracks!... He fancies he's still in barracks, that lark-skull! He's just come out of the depot and he would like to put it all over us again!... Well then, get on with it, go to the distribution, see the rations; they'll have a good laugh. The lads of the squad are always sure to be in a nice fix and no mistake. I don't care for myself, I'll manage all right."
And to show quite clearly that he was no longer one with a squad being led to the abyss by an incapable corporal, he sauntered off towards the church, whistling a little tune to himself.
The squads were being mustered when Gilbert came into the courtyard where the quartermaster had had unloaded, a few paces from the manure tank, the quarters of frozen meat which a man was now cutting up with an axe, potatoes, bully-beef, a burst sack from which trickled a thin stream of rice, and biscuits, which the youngsters were carrying off in their aprons to make pig's-meat with.
Stooping