Now and then holes were discovered in the hedge. Holes underneath the prickly thorn, not more than a foot high, but sufficient to allow a crawling body to wriggle through on its stomach. These holes persisted for a day or two or three, and then were suddenly staked up, with strong stakes and barbed wire. After which, a few days later, perhaps, other holes like them would be discovered in the hedge a little further along. After each hole was discovered, curious happenings would take place amongst the hospital staff. Certain men, orderlies or stretcher bearers, would be imprisoned. For example, the nurse of _Salle I._, the ward of the _grands blesses_, would come on duty some morning and discover that one of her orderlies was missing. Fouquet, who swept the ward, who carried basins, who gave the men their breakfasts, was absent. There was a beastly hitch in the ward work, in consequence. The floor was filthy, covered with cakes of mud tramped in by the stretcher bearers during the night. The men screamed for attention they did not receive. The wrong patients got the wrong food at meal times. And then the nurse would look out of one of the little square windows of the ward, and see Fouquet marching up and down the plank walks between the _baracques_, carrying his eighty pounds of marching kit, and smiling happily and defiantly. He was "in prison." The night before he had crawled through a hole in the hedge, got blind drunk in a neighbouring _estaminet_, and had swaggered boldly through the gates in the morning, to be "imprisoned." He wanted to be. He just could not stand it any longer. He was sick of it all. Sick of being _infirmier_, of sweeping the floor, of carrying vessels, of cutting up tough meat for sullen, one-armed men, with the _Croix de Guerre_ pinned to their coffee-streaked night shirts. Bah! The _Croix de Guerre_ pinned to a night shirt, egg-stained, smelling of sweat!