Wooden Crosses | Page 9

held out a chunk to
him, taken at random, and at once he shut up completely, his calm

recovered immediately, his anger all harmless and disarmed since he
was served. He turned then to Demachy, while the distribution went on.
"You see," he said with a friendly air, "you've got the idea all right, but
you don't give tongue enough. If you want to be better served than the
others you've got to give tongue, even without knowing anything about
anything: that's the only way to have your rights."
Gilbert Demachy listened without any answer, amused by this big
brawler with his bristle beard; his attentive silence pleased Sulphart.
"Of course that blockhead of a BrŽval never told you to fetch the
bucket or the bottles for the pinard. What do you think you're going to
carry it back in--in your boots? Good joy I thought something about it.
There's a bucket, and I brought a can in case there might be brandy....
It's no matter, a corporal that doesn't go himself to the distribution; you
only see that with the fifth.... He stayed behind once more writing to his
old woman.... Blitherer!"
Sulphart did not deign to have any truck with the distribution of tins of
bully-beef, a commodity for which he had nothing but contempt; but all
the same he cried, "There's one short!" just to show that he was still on
the spot.
"Now for the wine," said the quartermaster.
Sulphart dashed forward first of all, and as long as the distribution
lasted he never raised his head; while a bucket was filling he groaned
and moaned and uttered little cries of anguish, as if it was his heart's
blood that was being run off.
"That'll do!... That'll do!" he cried. "It holds more than the proper
measure.... Thief!"
But the others, who were accustomed to it all, endured the insults and
kept the wine. His turn came at length, and he got his bucket filled up
to the very brim, swearing that six new chums had turned up, that the
corporal was going to lodge a complaint, that they had already been

curtailed the day before, that the Captain....
"Here, and bung off," said the exasperated quartermaster, pouring out a
last quarter of a litre for him. "Lord, what a life!"
Highly pleased with himself, Sulphart went back like a conqueror, his
bucket in one hand and his bag on his shoulder. They passed through
the village, where the idle soldiers were roaming in quest of a pub, and
on the way he tried to inculcate into the new chum the first principles
of cunning and trickery essential for a soldier on campaign.
"Every man for himself, you know. I'd far rather drink other people's
drink than have the others drinking mine.... It always is the modest folk
that lose out."
Halting in a spot where nobody was passing, he dipped his
drinking-cup in the bucket and offered it to Gilbert.
"Here," he said, "drink that, you've a right to it."
He had, in a word, drawn up in his own mind, and for his own sole
personal guidance, a little treatise on the rights and duties of the soldier,
in which it was fully and frankly conceded that the man on ration
fatigue had a right to a cup of wine as a perquisite. He drank one too,
since he was helping the man on duty, and started off again by so much
the lighter. As they walked, he told Gilbert stories, talking in the same
breath of his wife, who was a dressmaker; of the battle of Guise; the
factory where he had worked in Paris, and of Morache, the Adjutant, a
re-enlisted man, our special horror. When they reached cantonments he
put down the bucket, taking oath that he had never so much as tasted
the wine, and offering to prove it by letting anybody smell his breath;
then he went to Demachy again, having taken a fancy to him.
"If I'd had the dibs like you," he said, "and had your education, I swear
they wouldn't have seen me coming into the fire like this. I'd have put
in for the officers' course, and I'd have gone and spent some months in
camp, and then they'd have listed me sub-lieutenant in the middle of
1915. And by that the war'll be over.... What I say is, that you didn't

know how to swim."
CHAPTER III
THE RED PENNON

FROM break of day the regiment was measuring out the road with its
long blue ribbon. There was a thick sound of tramping, voices, and
laughter moving forward in the midst of the dust. Untiringly the
comrades, elbow to elbow, told one another those hackneyed tales of
the regiment, every one like every other one, that