“And there’s that new shell, a dirty devil, that breaks wind after it’s dodged into the earth and out of it again two or three times in the space of six yards.  When I know there’s one of them about, I want to go round the corner.  I remember one time—­”

“That’s all nothing, my lads,” said the new sergeant, stopping on his way past, “you ought to see what they chucked us at Verdun, where I’ve come from.  Nothing but whoppers, 380’s and 420’s and 244’s.  When you’ve been shelled down there you know all about it—­the woods are sliced down like cornfields, the dug-outs marked and burst in even when they’ve three thicknesses of beams, all the road-crossings sprinkled, the roads blown into the air and changed into long heaps of smashed convoys and wrecked guns, corpses twisted together as though shoveled up.  You could see thirty chaps laid out by one shot at the cross-roads; you could see fellows whirling around as they went up, always about fifteen yards, and bits of trousers caught and stuck on the tops of the trees that were left.  You could see one of these 380’s go into a house at Verdun by the roof, bore through two or three floors, and burst at the bottom, and all the damn lot’s got to go aloft; and in the fields whole battalions would scatter and lie flat under the shower like poor little defenseless rabbits.  At every step on the ground in the fields you’d got lumps as thick as your arm and as wide as that, and it’d take four poilus to lift the lump of iron.  The fields looked as if they were full of rocks.  And that went on without a halt for months on end, months on end!” the sergeant repeated as he passed on, no doubt to tell again the story of his souvenirs somewhere else.

“Look, look, corporal, those chaps over there—­are they soft in the head?” On the bombarded position we saw dots of human beings emerge hurriedly and run towards the explosions.

“They’re gunners,” said Bertrand; “as soon as a shell’s burst they sprint and rummage for the fuse is the hole, for the position of the fuse gives the direction of its battery, you see, by the way it’s dug itself in; and as for the distance, you’ve only got to read it—­it’s shown on the range-figures cut on the time-fuse which is set just before firing.”

“No matter—­they’re off their onions to go out under such shelling.”

“Gunners, my boy,” says a man of another company who was strolling in the trench, “are either quite good or quite bad.  Either they’re trumps or they’re trash.  I tell you—­”

“That’s true of all privates, what you’re saying.”

“Possibly; but I’m not talking to you about all privates; I’m talking to you about gunners, and I tell you too that—­”

“Hey, my lads!  Better find a hole to dump yourselves in, before you get one on the snitch!”

The strolling stranger carried his story away, and Cocon, who was in a perverse mood, declared:  “We can be doing our hair in the dug-out, seeing it’s rather boring outside.”