“The other pals and boys,” said Marthereau, “they’re no better off than we are.  After breakfast I went to see a jail-bird of the 11th on the farm near the hospital.  You’ve to clamber over a wall by a ladder that’s too short—­talk about a scissor-cut!” says Marthereau, who is short in the leg; “and when once you’re in the hen-run and rabbit-hutch you’re shoved and poked by everybody and a nuisance to ’em all.  You don’t know where to put your pasties down.  I vamoosed from there, and sharp.”

“For my part,” says Cocon, “I wanted to go to the blacksmith’s when we’d got quit of grubbing, to imbibe something hot, and pay for it.  Yesterday he was selling coffee, but some bobbies called there this morning, so the good man’s got the shakes, and he’s locked his door.”

Lamuse has tried to clean his rifle.  But one cannot clean his rifle here, even if he squats on the ground near the door, nor even if he takes away the sodden tent-cloth, hard and icy, which hangs across the doorway like a stalactite; it is too dark.  “And then, old chap, if you let a screw fall, you may as well hang yourself as try to find it, ’specially when your fists are frozen silly.”

“As for me, I ought to be sewing some things, but—­what cheer!”

One alternative remains—­to stretch oneself on the straw, covering the head with handkerchief or towel to isolate it from the searching stench of fermenting straw, and sleep.  Fouillade, master of his time to-day, being on neither guard nor fatigues, decides.  He lights a taper to seek among his belongings, and unwinds the coils of his comforter, and we see his emaciated shape, sculptured in black relief, folding and refolding it.

“Potato fatigue, inside there, my little lambs!” a sonorous voice bellows at the door.  The hooded shape from which it comes is Sergeant Henriot.  He is a malignant sort of simpleton, and though all the while joking in clumsy sympathy he supervises the evacuation of quarters with a sharp eye for the evasive malingerer.

Outside, on the streaming road in the perpetual rain. the second section is scattered, also summoned and driven to work by the adjutant.  The two sections mingle together.  We climb the street and the hillock of clayey soil where the traveling kitchen is smoking.

“Now then, my lads, get on with it; it isn’t a long job when everybody sets to—­Come—­what have you got to grumble about, you?  That does no good.”

Twenty minutes later we return at a trot.  As we grope about in the barn, we cannot touch anything but what is sodden and cold, and the sour smell of wet animals is added to the vapor of the liquid manure that our beds contain.

We gather again, standing, around the props that hold the barn up, and around the rills that fall vertically from the holes in the roof—­faint columns which rest on vague bases of splashing water.  “Here we are again!” we cry.

Two lumps in turn block the doorway, soaked with the rain that drains from them—­Lamuse and Barque. who have been in quest of a brasier, and now return from the expedition empty-handed, sullen and vicious.  “Not a shadow of a fire-bucket, and what’s more, no wood or coal either, not for a fortune.”  It is impossible to have any fire.  “If I can’t get any, no one can,” says Barque, with a pride which a hundred exploits justify.