"You are a nice sort of chap, my buck! To let your old woman take the knocks to save your own skin!" "My boy, who can blame him? She's no further use to him!" "Tell me, then! Seeing that it was a Boche that made the mess, doesn't it make you hot?" The corporal, replacing the photograph in his pocket-book, replies: "You shut up! The model of that photograph is safe enough. I can trust her a bit more than I can trust myself. Understand?" A second man passes around two cartridges which a German bullet cut in two. Another voice says: "It is the lieutenant that had the luck. I have seen his coat; I can't understand it at all." A little while earlier I had shown Porchon my "wound." He agreed that I now held the record for what he called "the death graze." Fifteen days ago, during a night attack, he had the advantage over me. On the morning of the 9th, while we were crossing the open to occupy our positions as advance posts, a bullet had struck him in the left side, passed through his bag, cutting through a tin of meat, and finally slipped down his leg. He had recovered it from the top of his boot. Later, in the middle of the fight, seeing a soldier running through the darkness towards the rear of our lines, he had seized him roughly by the arm, crying: "Right about face at once." At which the other, a big, helmeted brute, had jumped back, raising his bayonet. And most undoubtedly that Boche would have spitted Porchon, whose revolver was empty, had not Courret, a corporal of the company, brought the man down with a shot fired at point-blank range. The sun, already high, gently warms the plateau. Towards ten o'clock, the cooks appear from the ravine behind us, where they have more cover from enemy eyes. They move along placidly, carrying buckets and cans, or piles of plates suspended from poles slung between them. "Shall we eat now with the men?" I asked Porchon. "Not for me," he replied. "The cyclist is foraging for us as well as for the captain. He has promised to bring up his loot as soon as he can." We wait an hour, two hours, our stomachs protesting, never moving our eyes from the ravine where the rest of the battalion is resting beside the fires. Down there is our portion of beef, rice and soup, which is so comforting when swallowed hot. It is so near, scarcely a mile away; and yet so far, since we have been stationed at the side of this road and dare not move. "When I think," groans Porchon, "that that animal of a cyclist may at this very moment be snoring in the shadow of the trees, lying on the soft moss, his stomach well filled, and his conscience at ease...." "The cyclist," I interrupt him, "is an inferior beast, but if you had only followed my advice a short while ago, we now should also have our stomachs well filled; and the cyclist would still remain in our eyes an admirable, serviceable and dependable man, as he was this morning before this question of food arose...."