boss, they should damn quick take our places in
the trenches, and they'd have to work for a change. To begin with, I
should say, 'Every man in the section will carry grease and soup in
turns.' Those who were willing, of course--"

"I'm confident," cries Cocon, "it's that Pepere that's keeping the
others back. He does it on purpose, firstly, and then, too, he can't
finish plucking himself in the morning, poor lad. He wants ten hours
for his flea-hunt, he's so finicking; and if he can't get 'em, monsieur
has the pip all day."

"Be damned to him," growls Lamuse. "I'd shift him out of bed if only I
was there! I'd wake him up with boot-toe, I'd--"

"I was reckoning, the other day," Cocon went on; "it took him seven
hours forty-seven minutes to come from thirty-one dug-out. It should
take him five good hours, but no longer."

Cocon is the Man of Figures. He has a deep affection, amounting to
rapacity, for accuracy in recorded computation. On any subject at all,
he goes burrowing after statistics, gathers them with the industry of
an insect, and serves them up on any one who will listen. Just now,
while he wields his figures like weapons, the sharp ridges and angles
and triangles that make up the paltry face where perch the double discs
of his glasses, are contracted with vexation. He climbs to the
firing-step (made in the days when this was the first line), and raises
his head angrily over the parapet. The light touch of a little shaft of
cold sunlight that lingers on the land sets a-glitter both his glasses
and the diamond that hangs from his nose.

"And that Pepere, too, talk about a drinking-cup with the bottom out!
You'd never believe the weight of stuff he can let drop on a single
journey."

With his pipe in the corner, Papa Blaire fumes in two senses. You can
see his heavy mustache trembling. It is like a comb made of bone,
whitish and drooping.

"Do you want to know what I think? These dinner men, they're the
dirtiest dogs of all. It's 'Blast this' and 'Blast that'--John Blast
and Co., I call 'em."

"They have all the elements of a dunghill about them," says Eudore,
with a sigh of conviction. He is prone on the ground, with his mouth
half-open and the air of a martyr. With one fading eye he follows the
movements of Pepin, who prowls to and fro like a hyaena.

Their spiteful exasperation with the loiterers mounts higher and
higher. Tirloir the Grumbler takes the lead and expands. This is where
he comes in. W