places at table. "Allons, a table!" We fall to. The meal is
abundant and of excellent quality. The sound of conversation mingles
with those of emptying bottles and filling jaws. While we taste the
joy of eating at a table, a glimmer of light trickles through a
vent-hole, and wraps in dusty dawn a piece of the atmosphere and a
patch of the table, while its reflex lights up a plate, a cap's
peak, an eye. Secretly I take stock of this gloomy little
celebration that overflows with gayety. Biquet is telling about his
suppliant sorrows in quest of a washerwoman who would agree to do
him the good turn of washing some linen, but "it was too damned
dear." Tulacque describes the queue outside the grocer's. One might
not go in; customers were herded outside, like sheep. "And although
you were outside, if you weren't satisfied, and groused too much,
they chased you off."

Any news yet? It is said that severe penalties have been imposed on
those who plunder the population, and there is already a list of
convictions. Volpatte has been sent down. Men of Class '93 are going
to be sent to the rear, and Pepere is one of them.

When Barque brings in the harvest of the fry-pan, he announces that
our hostess has soldiers at her table--ambulance men of the
machine-guns. "They thought they were the best off, but it's us
that's that," says Fouillade with decision, lolling grandly in the
darkness of the narrow and tainted hole where we are just as
confusedly heaped together as in a dug-out. But who would think of
making the comparison?

"Vous savez pas," says Pepin, "the chaps of the 9th, they're
in clover! An old woman has taken them in for nothing, because of