coffee--that's all."

"Nom de Dieu!" bawls Tulacque. "And wine?" He summons the crowd:
"Come and look here, all of you! That--that's the limit! We're done
out of our wine!"

Athirst and grimacing, they hurry up; and from the profoundest
depths of their being wells up the chorus of despair and
disappointment, "Oh, Hell!"

"Then what's that in there?" says the fatigue man, still ruddily
sweating, and using his foot to point at a bucket.

"Yes," says Paradis, "my mistake, there is some."

The fatigue man shrugs his shoulders, and hurls at Paradis a look of
unspeakable scorn--"Now you're beginning! Get your gig-lamps on, if
your sight's bad." He adds, "One cup each--rather less perhaps--some
chucklehead bumped against me, coming through the Boyau du Bois, and
a drop got spilled." "Ah!" he hastens to add, raising his voice, "if
I hadn't been loaded up, talk about the boot-toe he'd have got in
the rump! But he hopped it on his top gear, the brute!"

In spite of this confident assurance, the fatigue man makes off
himself, curses overtaking him as he goes, maledictions charged with
offensive reflections on his honesty and temperance, imprecations
inspired by this revelation of a ration reduced.

All the same, they throw themselves on the food, and eat it
standing, squatting, kneeling, sitting on tins, or on haversacks