times we had at Soissons."

"Ah, the Devil!"

A gleam of Paradise lost lights up their eyes and seems even to redden
their cold faces.

"Talk about a festival!" sighs Tirloir, as he leaves off scratching
himself, and looks pensively far away over Trenchland.

"Ah, nom de Dieu! All that town, nearly abandoned, that used to be
ours! The houses and the beds--"

"And the cupboards!"

"And the cellars!"

Lamuse's eyes are wet, his face like a nosegay, his heart full.

"Were you there long?" asks Cadilhac, who came here later, with the
drafts from Auvergne.

"Several months."

The conversation had almost died out, but it flames up again fiercely
at this vision of the days of plenty.

"We used to see," said Paradis dreamily, "the poilus pouring along and
behind the houses on the way back to camp with fowls hung round their
middles, and a rabbit under each arm, borrowed from some good fellow or
woman that they hadn't seen and won't ever see again."

We reflect on the far-off flavor of chicken and rabbit. "There were
things that we paid for, too. The spondu-licks just danced about. We
held all the aces in those days."

"A hundred thousand francs went rolling round the shops."

"Millions, oui. All the day, just a squandering that you've no idea of,
a sort of devil's delight."

"Believe me or not," said Blaire to Cadilhac, "but in the middle of it
all, what we had the least of was fires, just like here and everywhere
else you go. You had to chase it and find it and stick to it. Ah, mon
vieux, how we did run after the kindlings!"

"Well, we were in the camp of the C.H.R. The cook there was the great
Martin Cesar. He was the man for finding wood!"

"Ah, oui, oui! He was the ace of trumps! He got what he wanted without
twisting himself."

"Always some fire in his kitchen, young fellow. You saw cooks chasing
and gabbling about the streets in all directions, blubbering because
they had no coal or wood. But he'd got a fire. When he hadn't any, he
said, 'Don't worry, I'll see you through.' And he wasn't long about it,
either."

"He went a bit too far, even. The first time I saw him in his kitchen,
you'd never guess what he'd got the stew going with! With a violin that
he'd found in the house!"

"Rotten, all the same," says Mesnil Andre. "One knows well enough that
a violin isn't worth much when it comes to utility, but all the same--"

"Other times, he used billiard cues. Zizi just succeeded in pinching
one