“Pig suit,” frowns Muffage.

“Big bloody pig suit, yellow, pink, and blue, on my oath,” replies the corporal. “You’ll know him when you see him. You wouldn’t have a cigarette, one of you gentlemen, by any chance.”

Sounds of carousing reach them as they trudge along the tracks, past empty triple flats and tank cars. “Alcohol dump.”

“Fuel for their Nazi rockets, I’m told. If they ever get one in working order.”

Under a cold umbrella of naked light bulbs are gathered a crowd of Army personnel, American sailors, NAAFI girls, and German fräuleins. Fraternizing, every last one of them, shamefully, amid noise which becomes, as Muffage and Spontoon reach the edge of the gathering, a song, at whose center, with a good snootful, each arm circling a smiling and disheveled young tootsie, ruddy face under these lights gone an apoplectic mauve, and leading the glee, is the same General Wivern they last saw in Pointsman’s office back at Twelfth House. From a tank car whose contents, ethanol, 75% solution, are announced in stark white stenciling along the side, spigots protrude here and there, under which an incredible number of mess cups, china mugs, coffeepots, wastebaskets, and other containers are being advanced and withdrawn. Ukuleles, kazoos, harmonicas, and any number of makeshift metal noisemakers accompany the song, which is an innocent salute to Postwar, a hope that the end of shortages, the end of Austerity, is near:

It’s—

Mouthtrip-ping time!

Mouthtrip-ping time!

Time to open up that icebox door—

Oh yes it’s

Mouthtrip-ping time,

Mouthtrip-ping time,

And once you’ve eaten some, you’ll come, for more!

Ah, mouthtrip-ping time,

Mouthtrip-ping time!

It’s something old, but also very new-w-w—

Life’s so sublime,

In mouthtrip-ping time—

We hope you’re all mouthtrip-ping, toooooo!

Next chorus is soldiers ’n’ sailors all together for the first eight bars, girls for the second, General Wivern singing the next eight solo, and tutti to finish it up. Then comes a chorus for ukuleles and kazoos and so on while everyone dances, black neckerchiefs whipping about like the mustaches of epileptic villains, delicate snoods unloosening to allow stray locks of hair to escape their tight rolls, skirt-hems raised to expose flashing knees and slips edged in prewar Cluny lace a frail flight of smoky bat-wings here under the white electricity… on the final chorus the boys circle clockwise, girls anticlockwise, the ensemble opening out into a rose-pattern, from the middle of which dissipatedly leering tosspot General Wivern, tankard aloft, is hoisted briefly, like an erect stamen.

About the only one not participating here, aside from the two prowling surgeons, is Seaman Bodine, whom we left, you recall, carrying on in the bathtub at Säure Bummer’s place back in Berlin. Impeccable tonight in dress whites, straight-faced and sober, he trudges among the merrymakers, thickly sprouting hair from jumper sleeves and V-neck, so much of it that last week he spooked and lost a connection just in from the CBI theatre with close to a ton of bhang, who mistook him for a seagoing version of the legendary yeti or abominable snowman. To make up some of what he blew on that one, Bodine is tonight promoting the First International Runcible Spoon Fight, between his shipmate Avery Purfle and an English Commando named St. John Bladdery. “Place yer bets, yes yes the odds are even, 50/50,” announces suave croupier Bodine, pushing through the gathered bodies, many of them far from upright, one shaggy hand clutching a wad of occupation scrip. With the other, from time to time, he will tug the big collar of his jumper around and blow his nose on it, grommets on the hem of his T-shirt blinking, light bulbs dancing overhead in the wind he’s raised, his own several shadows thrashing in all directions and merging with others.