Meanwhile Tirette relates the outrages inflicted on him during his twenty-one days of training owing to the quarrelsome temper of a certain major:  “A great hog he was, my boy. everything rotten on this earth.  All the lot of us looked foul when he went by or when we saw him in the officers’ room spread out on a chair that you couldn’t see underneath him, with his vast belly and huge cap. and circled round with stripes from top to bottom, like a barrel—­he was hard on the private!  They called him Loeb—­a Boche, you see!”

“I knew him!” cried Paradis; “when war started he was declared unfit for active service, naturally.  While I was doing my term he was a dodger already—­but he dodged round all the street corners to pinch you—­you got a day’s clink for an unbuttoned button, and he gave it you over and above if there was some bit of a thing about you that wasn’t quite O.K.—­and everybody laughed.  He thought they were laughing at you, and you knew they were laughing at him, but you knew it in vain, you were in it up to your head for the clink.”

“He had a wife,” Tirette goes on, “the old—­”

“I remember her, too,” Paradis exclaimed.  “You talk about a bitch!”

“Some of ’em drag a little pug-dog about with ’em, but him, he trailed that yellow minx about everywhere, with her broom-handle hips and her wicked look.  It was her that worked the old sod up against us.  He was more stupid than wicked, but as soon as she was there he got more wicked than stupid.  So you bet they were some nuisance—­”

Just then, Marthereau wakes up from his sleep by the entry with a half-groan.  He straightens himself up, sitting on his straw like a gaol-bird, and we see his bearded silhouette take the vague outline of a Chinese, while his round eye rolls and turns in the shadows.  He is looking at his dreams of a moment ago.  Then he passes his hand over his eyes and—­as if it had some connection with his dream—­recalls the scene that night when we came up to the trenches—­“For all that,” he says, in a voice weighty with slumber and reflection, “there were some half-seas-over that night!  Ah, what a night!  All those troops, companies and whole regiments, yelling and surging all the way up the road!  In the thinnest of the dark you could see the jumble of poilus that went on and up—­like the sea itself, you’d say—­and carrying on across all the convoys of artillery and ambulance wagons that we met that night.  I’ve never seen so many, so many convoys in the night, never!” Then he deals himself a thump on the chest, settles down again in self-possession, groans, and says no more.

Blaire’s voice rises, giving expression to the haunting thought that wakes in the depths of the men:  “It’s four o’clock.  It’s too late for there to be anything from our side.”

One of the gamesters in the other corner yelps a question at another:  “Now then?  Are you going to play or aren’t you, worm-face?”