The conversation is breaking up; interest in it follows suit and is
scattered. Four poilus join in a game of manille, that will last
until night blacks out the cards. Volpatte is trying to catch a leaf
of cigarette paper that has escaped his fingers and goes hopping and
dodging in the wind along the wall of the trench like a fragile
butterfly.

Cocon and Tirette are recalling their memories of barrack-life. The
impressions left upon their minds by those years of military
training are ineffaceable. Into that fund of abundant souvenirs, of
abiding color and instant service, they have been wont to dip for
their subjects of conversation for ten, fifteen, or twenty years. So
that they still frequent it, even after a year and a half of actual
war in all its forms.

I can hear some of the talk and guess the rest of it. For it is
everlastingly the same sort of tale that they get out of their
military past;--the narrator once shut up a bad-tempered N.C.O. with
words of extreme appropriateness and daring. He wasn't afraid, he
spoke out loud and strong! Some scraps of it reach my ears--

"Alors, d'you think I flinched when Nenoeil said that to me? Not a
bit, my boy. All the pals kept their jaws shut but me; I spoke up,
'Mon adjudant,' I says, 'it's possible, but--'" A sentence follows
that I cannot secure--"Oh, tu sais, just like that, I said it. He
didn't get shirty; 'Good, that's good,' he says as he hops it, and
afterwards he was as good as all that, with me."

"Just like me, with Dodore, 'jutant of the 13th, when I was on