"There's no shortage of colonels!" Lance Corporal Pistil, who was on duty, and also on fatigue, snapped back at me.
 "And while waiting for the colonel to be replaced, I'll tell you what you can do, me lad. You get on with fetching the grub, together with Empouille and Kerdoncuff here. There's a couple of sacks for each of you, and it's behind the church over there that you'll find it.... And you can see to it you don't get handed a bag of bloody bones, as you did yesterday. And I'll thank you to get a move on with it and not come bleedin' in here after nightfall, you stiffs...."
 So off we went again, all three of us.
 "I sha'n't ever tell them anything in future," I said to myself. I was annoyed. There was clearly no point in telling their sort about such a thing as l'd just seen; one only got bawled at for one's pains. It was already too long past to be of any interest. And when you think that a week before I would have had four columns in the papers, along with my photograph, for announcing the death of a colonel like that. Just a brainless lot of sods, that's all!
 It was in a cherry orchard dried up by the August sun that the meat for the whole regiment was being doled out. On sacks and on tent canvas spread out on the ground and on the grass itself were pounds and pounds of tripe and whitish-yellow fat and whole disembowelled sheep in a havoc of entrails which oozed curious little streams into the surrounding grass. The carcass of an ox had been cut in two and hung in a tree. The four butchers of the regiment were still clambering around it, swearing and tugging at portions of its flesh. There was any amount of brawling between sections over morsels of rich meat, and kidneys in particular, amid clouds of those flies which are only seen at such moments and are as lusty and clamorous as sparrows.
 And then, too, there was blood everywhere, softly flowing through the grass in search of sloping ground. The last pig was being killed near by. Four men and one of the butchers were already squabbling over some of the bits to come.
 "Damn your eyes, it was you pinched the sirloin yesterday...."
 I had time to glance twice at this discussion of food values, as I leant against a tree, and then I had to give way to an overwhelming desire to vomit—more than a little, until I fainted.
 Well, they took me back to camp on a stretcher, but not without making good use of the opportunity to rummage through my two rubber-lined meat sacks.
 I awoke into another of Pistil's cursing fits. The war was still in full swing.