“I’ve no revolver,” says Volpatte, “nor a Boche pay-book, but I could have had two knives or even ten knives; but I only need one.”

“That depends,” says Barque.  “And have you any mechanical buttons, fathead?”

“I haven’t any,” cries Becuwe.

“The private can’t do without ’em,” Lamuse asserts.  “Without them, to make your braces stick to your breeches, the game’s up.”

“And I’ve always got in my pocket,” says Blaire, “so’s they’re within reach, my case of rings.”  He brings it cut, wrapped up in a gas-mask bag, and shakes it.  The files ring inside, and we hear the jingle of aluminium rings in the rough.

“I’ve always got string,” says Biquet, “that’s the useful stuff!”

“Not so useful as nails,” says Pepin, and he shows three in his hand, big, little, and average.

One by one the others come to join in the conversation. to chaffer and cadge.  We are getting used to the half-darkness.  But Corporal Salavert, who has a well-earned reputation for dexterity, makes a banging lamp with a candle and a tray, the latter contrived from a Camembert box and some wire.  We light up, and around its illumination each man tells what he has in his pockets, with parental preferences and bias.

“To begin with, how many have we?”

“How many pockets?  Eighteen,” says some one—­Cocon, of course, the man of figures.

“Eighteen pockets!  You’re codding, rat-nose,” says big Lamuse.

“Exactly eighteen,” replies Cocon.  “Count them, if you’re as clever as all that.”

Lamuse is willing to be guided by reason in the matter, and putting his two hands near the light so as to count accurately, he tells off his great brick-red fingers:  Two pockets in the back of the greatcoat; one for the first-aid packet, which is used for tobacco; two inside the greatcoat in front; two outside it on each side, with flaps; three in the trousers, and even three and a half, counting the little one in front.

“I’ll bet a compass on it,” says Farfadet.

’And I, my bits of tinder.”

“I,” says Tirloir, “I’ll bet a teeny whistle that my wife sent me when she said, ’If you’re wounded in the battle you must whistle, so that your comrades will come and save your life.’”

We laugh at the artless words.  Tulacque intervenes, and says indulgently to Tiloir, “They don’t know what war is back there; and if you started talking about the rear, it’d be you that’d talk rot.”

“We won’t count that pocket,” says Salavert, “it’s too small.  That makes ten.”

“In the jacket, four.  That only makes fourteen after all.”

“There are the two cartridge pockets, the two new ones that fasten with straps.”

“Sixteen,” says Salavert.

“Now, blockhead and son of misery, turn my jacket back.  You haven’t counted those two pockets.  Now then, what more do you want?  And yet they’re just in the usual place.  They’re your civilian pockets, where you shoved your nose-rag, your tobacco, and the address where you’d got to deliver your parcel when you were a messenger.”