k about a
bombardment--something very choice in the way of mixtures!" He sniffles
and passes his sleeve under his concave nose. His hand gropes within
his greatcoat and his jacket till it finds the skin, and scratches.
"I've killed thirty of them in the candle," he growls; "in the big
dug-out by the tunnel, mon vieux, there are some like crumbs of metal
bread. You can see them running about in the straw like I'm telling
you."

"Who's been attacking? The Boches?"

"The Boches and us too--out Vimy way--a counterattack--didn't you hear
it?"

"No," the big Lamuse, the ox-man, replies on my account; "I was
snoring; but I was on fatigue all night the night before."

"I heard it," declares the little Breton, Biquet; "I slept badly, or
rather, didn't sleep. I've got a doss-house all to myself. Look, see,
there it is--the damned thing." He points to a trough on the ground
level, where on a meager mattress of muck, there is just body-room for
one. "Talk about home in a nutshell!" he declares, wagging the rough
and rock-hard little head that looks as if it had never been finished.
"I hardly snoozed. I'd just got off, but was woke up by the relief of
the 129th that went by--not by the noise, but the smell. Ah, all those
chaps with their feet on the level with my nose! It woke me up, it gave
me nose-ache so."

I knew it. I have often been wakened in the trench myself by the trail
of heavy smell in the wake of marching men.

"It was all right, at least, if it killed the vermin," said Tirette.

"On the contrary, it excites them," says Lamuse; "the worse you smell,
the more you have of 'em."

"And it's lucky," Biquet went on, "that their stink woke me up. As I
was telling that great tub just now, I got my peepers open just in time
to seize the tent-cloth that shut my hole up--one of those muck-heaps
was going to pinch it off me."

"Dirty devils, the 129th." The human form from which the words came
could now be distinguished down below at our feet, where the morning
had not yet reached it. Grasping his abundant clothing by handsful, he
squatted and wriggled. It was Papa Blaire. His little eyes blinked
among the dust that luxuriated on his face. Above the gap of his
toothless mouth, his mustache made a heavy sallow lump. His hands were
horribly black, the top of them shaggy with dirt, the palms plastered
in gray relief. Himself, shriveled and dirtbedight, exhaled the scent
of an ancient stewpan. Though busily scratching, he c