“You know he’s going to be carpeted, they say, for that affair of the shell-hole with Volpatte.”  And they mixed the two exploits together in a muddled way, that of the shell-hole, and the present, and looked on him as the hero of the moment, while he puffed, sniffled, grunted, spat, and tried to dry himself under the celestial shower-bath with rapid rubbing and as a measure of deception; then at last he resumed his clothes.

* * * * * *

After his wash, Fouillade feels cold.  He turns about and stands in the doorway of the barn that shelters us.  The arctic blast discolors and disparages his long face, so hollow and sunburned; it draws tears from his eyes, and scatters them on the cheeks once scorched by the mistral; his nose, too, weeps increasingly.

Yielding to the ceaseless bite of the wind that grips his ears in spite of the muffler knotted round his head, and his calves in spite of the yellow puttees with which his cockerel legs are enwound, he reenters the barn, but comes out of it again at once, rolling ferocious eyes, and muttering oaths with the accent one hears in that corner of the land, over six hundred miles from here, whence he was driven by war.

So he stands outside, erect, more truly excited than ever before in these northern scenes.  And the wind comes and steals into him, and comes again roughly, shaking and maltreating his scarecrow’s slight and flesh-less figure.

Ye gods!  It is almost uninhabitable, the barn they have assigned to us to live in during this period of rest.  It is a collapsing refuge, gloomy and leaky, confined as a well.  One half of it is under water—­we see rats swimming in it—­and the men are crowded in the other half.  The walls, composed of laths stuck together with dried mud, are cracked, sunken, holed in all their circuit, and extensively broken through above.  The night we got here—­until the morning—­we plugged as well as we could the openings within reach, by inserting leafy branches and hurdles.  But the higher holes, and those in the roof, still gaped and always.  When dawn hovers there, weakling and early, the wind for contrast rushes in and blows round every side with all its strength, and the squad endures the hustling of an everlasting draught.

When we are there, we remain upright in the ruined obscurity, groping, shivering, complaining.

Fouillade, who has come in once more, goaded by the cold, regrets his ablutions.  He has pains in his loins and back.  He wants something to do, but what?

Sit down?  Impossible; it is too dirty inside there.  The ground and the paving-stones are plastered with mud; the straw scattered for our sleeping is soaked through, by the water that comes through the holes and by the boots that wipe themselves with it.  Besides, if you sit down, you freeze; and if you lie on the straw, you are troubled by the smell of manure, and sickened by the vapors of ammonia.  Fouillade contents himself by looking at his place, and yawning wide enough to dislocate his long jaw, further lengthened by a goatee beard where you would see white hairs if the daylight were really daylight.