Wooden Crosses | Page 6

were telling complicated and brutal stories with the
appropriate "and so thens" and "you remember nows," essential to the
due ordering of a tale. But the newcomers, whose legs they were trying
to pull, whom they meant to amaze, were no longer listening: they were
half asleep, with wandering eyes and drooping chins.
"Time to go to bed, lads," said BrŽval, unlacing his boots. "These boys
have spent last night in the train."
Everybody went to his place with the docility of horses that knew their
corner. Lemoine hesitated to trample on the fine carpet of fresh straw.
"That's not bad.... wheat that hasn't been thrashed...."
Carefully, as he did everything, little BŽlin made his bed ready. First
he spread out his strip of tent canvas; then by way of a pillow, he thrust
his satchel under the 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. BŽlin 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
BrŽval 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