snoring; but I was on fatigue all night the night before."

"I heard it," declares the little Breton, Biquet; "I slept badly, or
rather, didn't sleep. I've got a doss-house all to myself. Look,
see, there it is--the damned thing." He points to a trough on the
ground level, where on a meager mattress of muck, there is just
body-room for one. "Talk about home in a nutshell!" he declares,
wagging the rough and rock-hard little head that looks as if it had
never been finished. "I hardly snoozed. I'd just got off, but was
woke up by the relief of the 129th that went by--not by the noise,
but the smell. Ah, all those chaps with their feet on the level with
my nose! It woke me up, it gave me nose-ache so."

I knew it. I have often been wakened in the trench myself by the
trail of heavy smell in the wake of marching men.

"It was all right, at least, if it killed the vermin," said Tirette.

"On the contrary, it excites them," says Lamuse; "the worse you
smell, the more you have of 'em."

"And it's lucky," Biquet went on, "that their stink woke me up. As I
was telling that great tub just now, I got my peepers open just in
time to seize the tent-cloth that shut my hole up--one of those
muck-heaps was going to pinch it off me."

"Dirty devils, the 129th." The human form from which the words came
could now be distinguished down below at our feet, where the morning
had not yet reached it. Grasping his abundant clothing by handsful,
he squatted and wriggled. It was Papa Blaire. His little eyes