' And a minute later, 'If I don't speak,
there's never a pint of wine there at all.' And if you were passing
later you'd hear him again, 'Tiens! is that a pint of wine there?
Well, you'll see if I don't speak! Result--he said nothing at all.
You'll say, 'But he got killed.' True, but previously he had God's
own time to do it two thousand times if he'd dared."
"All that, it makes me ill," growled Blaire, sullen, but with a
flash of fury.
"We others, we've seen nothing--seeing that we don't see
anything--but if we did see--!"
"Old chap," Volpatte cried, "those depots--take notice of what I
say--you'd have to turn the Seine, the Garonne, the Rhone and the
Loire into them to clean them. In the interval, they're living, and
they live well, and they go to doze peacefully every night, every
night!"
The soldier held his peace. In the distance he saw the night as they
would pass it--cramped up, trembling with vigilance in the deep
darkness, at the bottom of the listening-hole whose ragged jaws
showed in black outline all around whenever a gun hurled its dawn
into the sky.
Bitterly said Cocon: "All that, it doesn't give you any desire to
die."
"Yes, it does," some one replies tranquilly. "Yes, it does. Don't
exaggerate, old kipper-skin."
______
[note 1:] Thirty or thirty-one years old in 1914.--Tr.
[note 2:] A-shape badges worn on the left arm to indicate the
duration of service at the front.--Tr.
[note 3:] Soldiers voluntarily enlisted in ordinary times for three.
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