find it, 'specially when your fists are frozen silly."

"As for me, I ought to be sewing some things, but--what cheer!"

One alternative remains--to stretch oneself on the straw, covering
the head with handkerchief or towel to isolate it from the searching
stench of fermenting straw, and sleep. Fouillade, master of his time
to-day, being on neither guard nor fatigues, decides. He lights a
taper to seek among his belongings, and unwinds the coils of his
comforter, and we see his emaciated shape, sculptured in black
relief, folding and refolding it.

"Potato fatigue, inside there, my little lambs!" a sonorous voice
bellows at the door. The hooded shape from which it comes is
Sergeant Henriot. He is a malignant sort of simpleton, and though
all the while joking in clumsy sympathy he supervises the evacuation
of quarters with a sharp eye for the evasive malingerer.

Outside, on the streaming road in the perpetual rain. the second
section is scattered, also summoned and driven to work by the
adjutant. The two sections mingle together. We climb the street and
the hillock of clayey soil where the traveling kitchen is smoking.

"Now then, my lads, get on with it; it isn't a long job when
everybody sets to--Come--what have you got to grumble about, you?
That does no good."

Twenty minutes later we return at a trot. As we grope about in the
barn, we cannot touch anything but what is sodden and cold, and the
sour smell of wet animals is added to the vapor of the liquid manure