Dennison returned to Zinc and munched a doughnut underneath his nose--sitting down beside him. "See how it’s done!" "How’d you rate that?" "Reach in my jacket ... there’s another sinkah ... you all likes ’em." Zinc appreciated Dennison’s fake accent, fished for the doughnut, and bit into it. "Perfect." Hunkered on the tree, they finished their food and drank more coffee. They stopped talking. Dennison lit a cigarette and offered his pack to Zinc, who accepted one. They had stopped talking because of fear. Fear was in the cigarette. In the sand. "Landel was nervous as hell yesterday," Dennison began. "He acted as if the whole Africa Korps was on him!" He remembered Landel bellowing over the tank intercom, storming about supplies. Using the radio he screamed at officers, berating them when they answered. "Operation haywire," Zinc commented, recalling the outburst. "Colonel Morris says he’ll report Landel ... Landel was drunk on Monday ... well, hell, we need a break," he said, wanting a leave, a week, two weeks, a month away from the assaults. Let some other guy knife his way through the Anadi pocket. Let some other crew hammer at the men entrenched at Anadi. Anadi was nothing. Never could mean anything. "Morris is bad," Zinc said. "He couldn’t take it yesterday, couldn’t talk some of the time. One of his men got shot through the head. Their tank conked out ... a faulty timer." Again they stopped talking, already feeling the heat of their bus, the perspiration drenching their legs and arms and backs; they felt the lunging of their machine; they heard the sob of the motor, the bang of pistons, the bark of the exhaust. Fear slid down the dune, sat with them, picked at the grains of sand, shuffled through the dying fire, rubbed their faces, old fear, present before every attack. They heard the far off shelling, felt it in their feet. A nerve began to tremble in Dennison’s right hand. He looked at his hand, stared. He thought of the little village of Ermenonville, his E, thought of his years there, his aunt’s home, those gawky French windows in grey stone walls; he thought of his uncle’s writing desk in his room upstairs, a desk usually littered with maps and photos and calculations--pigeonholes ready to burst. As he peered at the sand under his shoes he saw the fishing tackle in his own room ... rod and gun rack. He could almost see the park at E, the oaks, ash, chestnut, willow ... the miniature island where Rousseau had been buried ... the Petit Lac reflected the tall Lombardies on the island ... a swan--swimming sedately--was part of the scene ... the ivy walled château. Millard sat on the tree trunk, yakking, repeating rumors, speculating: each man had something to say about the terrain that was ahead: unfolding a map, some went over the lay of the land together. Wiping their mess kits half way clean with handfuls of sand they tossed them into a bin behind Raub’s kitchen. By now the fire was out.