IT is five o'clock in the evening. Three men are seen moving in the
bottom of the gloomy trench. Around their extinguished fire in the
dirty excavation they are frightful to see, black and sinister. Rain
and negligence have put their fire out, and the four cooks are looking
at the corpses of brands that are shrouded in ashes and the stumps of
wood whence the flame has flown.
Volpatte staggers up to the group and throws down the black mass that
he had on his shoulder. "I've pulled it out of a dug-out where it won't
show much."
"We have wood," says Blaire, "but we've got to light it. Otherwise, how
are we going to cook this cab-horse?"
"It's a fine piece," wails a dark-faced man, "thin flank. In my belief,
that's the best bit of the beast, the flank."
"Fire?" Volpatte objects, "there are no more matches, no more anything."
"We must have fire," growls Poupardin, whose indistinct bulk has the
proportions of a bear as he rolls and sways in the dark depths of our
cage.
"No two ways about it, we've got to have it," Pepin agrees. He is
coming out of a dug-out like a sweep out of a chimney. His gray mass
emerges and appears, like night upon evening.
"Don't worry; I shall get some," declares Blaire in a concentrated tone
of angry decision. He has not been cook long, and is keen to show
himself quite equal to adverse conditions in the exercise of his
functions.
He spoke as Martin Cesar used to speak when he was alive. His aim is to
resemble the great legendary figure of the cook who always found ways
for a fire, just as others, among the non-coms., would fain imitate
Napoleon.
"I shall go if it's necessary and fetch every bit of wood there is at
Battalion H.Q. I shall go and requisition the colonel's matches--I
shall go--"
"Let's go and forage." Poupardin leads the way. His face is like the
bottom of a saucepan that the fire has gradually befouled. As it is
cruelly cold, he is wrapped up all over. He wears a cape which is half
goatskin and half sheepskin, half brown and half whitish, and this
twofold skin of tints geometrically cut makes him like some strange
occult animal.
Pepin has a cotton cap so soiled and so shiny with grease that it might
be made of black silk. Volpatte, inside his Balaklava and his fleeces,
resembles a walking tree-trunk. A square opening betrays a yellow face
at the top of the thick and heavy bark of the mass he makes, which is
bifurcated by a couple of legs.
"Let's look up the 10th. They've always got the needful. They're on the
Pylones road, beyond the Boyau-Neuf."
The four alarming objects get under way, cloud-shape, in the trench
that unwinds itself sinuously before them like a blind alley, unsafe,
unlighted, and unpaved. It is uninhabited, too, in this part, being a
gangway between the second lines and the first lines.
In the dusty twilight two Moroccans meet the fire-questing cooks. One
has the skin of a black boot and the other of a yellow shoe. Hope
gleams in the depths of the cooks' hearts.
"Matches, boys?"
"Napoo," replies the black one, and his smile reveals his long
crockery-like teeth in his cigar-colored mouth of moroccan leather.
In his turn the yellow one advances and asks, "Tobacco? A bit of
tobacco?" And he holds out his greenish sleeve and his great hard paw,
in which the cracks are full of brown dirt, and the nails purplish.
Pepin growls, rummages in his clothes, and pulls out a pinch of
tobacco, mixed with dust, which he hands to the sharpshooter.
A little farther they meet a sentry who is half asleep--in the middle
of the evening--on a heap of loose earth. The drowsy soldier says,
"It's to the right, and then again to the right, and then straight
forward. Don't go wrong about it."
They march--for a long time. "We must have come a long way," says
Volpatte, after half an hour of fruitless paces and encloistered
loneliness.
"I say, we're going downhill a hell of a lot, don't you think?" asks
Blaire.
"Don't worry, old duffer," scoffs Pepin, "but if you've got cold feet
you can leave us to it."
Still we tramp on in the falling night. The ever-empty trench--a desert
of terrible length--has taken a shabby and singular appearance. The
parapets are in ruins; earthslides have made the ground undulate in
hillocks.
An indefinite uneasiness lays hold of the four huge fire-hunters, and
increases as night overwhelms them in this monstrous road.
Pepin, who is leading just now, stands fast and holds up his hand as a
signal to halt. "Footsteps," they say in a sobered tone.
Then, and in the heart of them, they are afraid. It was a mistake for
them all to leave their shelter for so long. They are to blame. And one
never knows.
"Get in there, quick, quick!" says Pepin, pointing to a right-angled
cranny on the ground level.
By the test of a hand, the rectangular shadow is proved to be the entry
to a funk-hole. They crawl in singly; and the last one, impatient,
pushes the others; they become an involuntary carpet in the dense
darkness of the hole.
A sound of steps and of voices becomes distinct and draws nearer. From
the mass of the four men who tightly hung up the burrow, tentative
hands are put out at a venture. All at once Pepin murmurs in a stifled
voice, "What's this?"
"What?" ask the others, pressed and wedged against him.
"Clips!" says Pepin under his breath, "Boche cartridge-clips on the
shelf! We're in the Boche trench!"
"Let's hop it." Three men make a jump to get out.
"Look out, bon Dieu! Don't stir!--footsteps--"
They hear some one walking, with the quick step of a solitary man. They
keep still and hold their breath. With their eyes fixed on the ground
level, they see the darkness moving on the right, and then a shadow
with legs detaches itself, approaches, and passes. The shadow assumes
an outline. It is topped by a helmet covered with a cloth and rising to
a point. There is no other sound than that of his passing feet.
Hardly has the German gone by when the four cooks, with no concerted
plan and with a single movement, burst forth, jostling each other, run
like madmen, and hurl themselves on him.
"Kamerad, messieurs!" he says.
But the blade of a knife gleams and disappears. The man collapses as if
he would plunge into the ground. Pepin seizes the helmet as the Boche
is failing and keeps it in his hand.
"Let's leg it," growls the voice of Poupardin.
"Got to search him first!"
They lift him and turn him over, and set the soft, damp and warm body
up again. Suddenly he coughs.
"He isn't dead!"--"Yes, he is dead; that's the air."
They shake him by the pockets; with hasty breathing the four black men
stoop over their task. "The helmet's mine," says Pepin. "It was me that
knifed him, I want the helmet."
They tear from the body its pocket-book of still warm papers, its
field-glass, purse, and leggings.
"Matches!" shouts Blaire, shaking a box, "he's got some!"
"Ah, the fool that you are!" hisses Volpatte.
"Now let's be off like hell." They pile the body in a corner and break
into a run, prey to a sort of panic, and regardless of the row their
disordered flight makes.
"It's this way!--This way!--Hurry, lads--for all you're worth!"
Without speaking they dash across the maze of the strangely empty
trench that seems to have no end.
"My wind's gone," says Blaire, "I'm--" He staggers and stops.
"Come on, buck up, old chap," gasps Pepin, hoarse and breathless. He
takes him by the sleeve and drags him forward like a stubborn
shaft-horse.
"We're right!" says Poupardin suddenly. "Yes, I remember that tree.
It's the Pylones road!"
"Ah!" wails Blaire, whose breathing is shaking him like an engine. He
throws himself forward with a last impulse--and sits down on the ground.
"Halt!" cries a sentry--"Good Lord!" he stammers as he sees the four
poilus. "Where the--where are you coming from, that way?"
They laugh, jump about like puppets, full-blooded and streaming with
perspiration, blacker than ever in the night. The German officer's
helmet is gleaming in the hands of Pepin. "Oh, Christ!" murmurs the
sentry, with gaping mouth, "but what's been up?"
An exuberant reaction excites and bewitches them. All talk at once. In
haste and confusion they act again the drama which hardly yet they
realize is over. They had gone wrong when they left the sleepy sentry
and had taken the International Trench, of which a part is ours and
another part German. Between the French and German sections there is no
barricade or division. There is merely a sort of neutral zone, at the
two ends of which sentries watch ceaselessly. No doubt the German
watcher was not at his post, or likely he hid himself when he saw the
four shadows, or perhaps be doubled back and had not time to bring up
reinforcements. Or perhaps, too, the German officer had strayed too far
ahead in the neutral zone. In short, one understands what happened
without understanding it.
"The funny part of it," says Pepin, "is that we knew all about that,
and never thought to be careful about it when we set off."
"We were looking for matches," says Volpatte.
"And we've got some!" cries Pepin. "You've not lost the flamers, old
broomstick?"
"No damned fear!" says Blaire; "Boche matches are better stuff than
ours. Besides, they're all we've got to light our fire! Lose my box?
Let any one try to pinch it off me!"
"We're behind time--the soup-water'll be freezing. Hurry up, so far.
Afterwards there'll be a good yarn to tell in the sewer where the boys
are, about what we did to the Boches."