"He went a bit too far, even. The first time I saw him in his kitchen, you'd never guess what he'd got the stew going with! With a violin that he'd found in the house!" "Rotten, all the same," says Mesnil Andre. "One knows well enough that a violin isn't worth much when it comes to utility, but all the same--" "Other times, he used billiard cues. Zizi just succeeded in pinching one for a cane, but the rest--into the fire! Then the arm-chairs in the drawing-room went by degrees--mahogany, they were. He did 'em in and cut them up by night, case some N.C.O. had something to say about it." "He knew his way about," said Pepin. "As for us, we got busy with an old suite of furniture that lasted us a fortnight." "And what for should we be without? You've got to make dinner, and there's no wood or coal. After the grub's served out, there you are with your jaws empty, with a pile of meat in front of you, and in the middle of a lot of pals that chaff and bullyrag you!" "It's the War Office's doing, it isn't ours." "Hadn't the officers a lot to say about the pinching?" "They damn well did it themselves, I give you my word! Desmaisons, do you remember Lieutenant Virvin's trick, breaking down a cellar door with an ax? And when a poilu saw him at it, he gave him the door for firewood, so that he wouldn't spread it about." "And poor old Saladin, the transport officer. He was found coming out of a basement in the dusk with two bottles of white wine in each arm, the sport, like a nurse with two pairs of twins. When he was spotted, they made him go back down to the wine-cellar, and serve out bottles for everybody. But Corporal Bertrand, who is a man of scruples, wouldn't have any. Ah, you remember that, do you, sausage-foot!" "Where's that cook now that always found wood?" asks Cadilhac. "He's dead. A bomb fell in his stove. He didn't get it, but he's dead all the same--died of shock when he saw his macaroni with its legs in the air. Heart seizure, so the doc' said. His heart was weak--he was only strong on wood. They gave him a proper funeral--made him a coffin out of the bedroom floor, and got the picture nails out of the walls to fasten 'em together, and used bricks to drive 'em in. While they were carrying him off, I thought to myself, 'Good thing for him he's dead. If he saw that, he'd never be able to forgive himself for not having thought of the bedroom floor for his fire.'--Ah, what the devil are you doing, son of a pig?" Volpatte offers philosophy on the rude intrusion of a passing fatigue party: "The private gets along on the back of his pals. When you spin your yarns in front of a fatigue gang, or when you take the best bit or the best place, it's the others that suffer."