“We must have fire,” growls Poupardin, whose indistinct bulk has the proportions of a bear as he rolls and sways in the dark depths of our cage.

“No two ways about it, we’ve got to have it,” Pepin agrees.  He is coming out of a dug-out like a sweep out of a chimney.  His gray mass emerges and appears, like night upon evening.

“Don’t worry; I shall get some,” declares Blaire in a concentrated tone of angry decision.  He has not been cook long, and is keen to show himself quite equal to adverse conditions in the exercise of his functions.

He spoke as Martin Cesar used to speak when he was alive.  His aim is to resemble the great legendary figure of the cook who always found ways for a fire, just as others, among the non-coms., would fain imitate Napoleon.

“I shall go if it’s necessary and fetch every bit of wood there is at Battalion H.Q.  I shall go and requisition the colonel’s matches—­I shall go—­”

“Let’s go and forage.”  Poupardin leads the way.  His face is like the bottom of a saucepan that the fire has gradually befouled.  As it is cruelly cold, he is wrapped up all over.  He wears a cape which is half goatskin and half sheepskin, half brown and half whitish, and this twofold skin of tints geometrically cut makes him like some strange occult animal.

Pepin has a cotton cap so soiled and so shiny with grease that it might be made of black silk.  Volpatte, inside his Balaklava and his fleeces, resembles a walking tree-trunk.  A square opening betrays a yellow face at the top of the thick and heavy bark of the mass he makes, which is bifurcated by a couple of legs.

“Let’s look up the 10th.  They’ve always got the needful.  They’re on the Pylones road, beyond the Boyau-Neuf.”

The four alarming objects get under way, cloud-shape, in the trench that unwinds itself sinuously before them like a blind alley, unsafe, unlighted, and unpaved.  It is uninhabited, too, in this part, being a gangway between the second lines and the first lines.

In the dusty twilight two Moroccans meet the fire-questing cooks.  One has the skin of a black boot and the other of a yellow shoe.  Hope gleams in the depths of the cooks’ hearts.

“Matches, boys?”

“Napoo,” replies the black one, and his smile reveals his long crockery-like teeth in his cigar-colored mouth of moroccan leather.

In his turn the yellow one advances and asks, “Tobacco?  A bit of tobacco?” And be holds out his greenish sleeve and his great hard paw, in which the cracks are full of brown dirt, and the nails purplish.

Pepin growls, rummages in his clothes, and pulls out a pinch of tobacco, mixed with dust, which he hands to the sharpshooter.

A little farther they meet a sentry who is half asleep—­in the middle of the evening—­on a heap of loose earth.  The drowsy soldier says, “It’s to the right, and then again to the right, and then straight forward.  Don’t go wrong about it.”