Under Fire Read Online Free PDF Page B

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. With his little pointed gesticulations he goads and spurs the anger all around him.
    "Ah, the devils, what? The sort of meat they threw at us yesterday! Talk about whetstones! Beef from an ox, that? Beef from a bicycle, yes rather! I said to the boys, 'Look here, you chaps, don't you chew it too quick, or you'll break your front teeth on the nails!'"
    Tirloir's harangue--he was manager of a traveling cinema, it seems--would have made us laugh at other times, but in the present temper it is only echoed by a circulating growl.
    "Another time, so that you won't grumble about the toughness, they send you something soft and flabby that passes for meat, something with the look and the taste of a sponge--or a poultice. When you chew that, it's the same as a cup of water, no more and no less."
    "Tout ca," says Lamuse, "has no substance; it gets no grip on your guts. You think you're full, but at the bottom of your tank you're empty. So, bit by bit, you turn your eyes up, poisoned for want of sustenance."
    "The next time," Biquet exclaims in desperation, "I shall ask to see the old man, and I shall say, 'Mon capitaine'--"
    "And I," says Barque, "shall make myself look sick, and I shall say,
'Monsieur le major'--"
    "And get nix or the kick-out--they're all alike--all in a band to take it out of the poor private."
    "I tell you, they'd like to get the very skin off us!"
    "And the brandy, too! We have a right to get it brought to the trenches--as long as it's been decided somewhere--I don't know when or where, but I know it--and in the three days that we've been here, there's three days that the brandy's been dealt out to us on the end of a fork!"
    "Ah, malheur!"
    * * * * * *
    "There's the grub!" announces a poilu [note 1] who was on the
look-out at the corner.
    "Time, too!"
    And the storm of revilings ceases as if by magic. Wrath is changed
into sudden contentment.
    Three breathless fatigue men, their