"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.
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