And a little later, walls around them again, something enclosing in any case, and Georges sitting down obediently, his mouth, his tongue, his lips trying to say: “I’d rather eat something If you have something to eat I. . .” but not managing to, looking with impotent despair at the man with the cadaverous face talking to the woman standing beside their table, then the woman going away, coming back, setting down the glass in front of him and filling it (the glass a tiny reversed cone very wide above the thin stem) with something transparent and colourless like water but which he felt like spitting out when it was in his mouth, harsh, burning. Still he didn’t spit it out, swallowed it, as he docilely swallowed the contents—also colourless, transparent, harsh and burning—of the second glass she poured out, still trying (or rather struggling to try) to say that he would rather have a bite to eat but realizing with the same mute despair that such a thing (asking for something to eat) was completely beyond his strength, contenting himself, then, with listening (trying to listen) to what they were saying and emptying the little cones filled with the colourless and burning liquid, wondering if the flies had already begun to buzz round him as over the dead horse, thinking of the planes, thinking again: “But they couldn’t have killed him twice So?” until he realized that he was drunk, saying: “I don’t know what it was. I mean: I didn’t know where I was or when or what was happening if I was thinking about him (beginning to rot in the sun wondering when he would begin stinking for good still brandishing his sabre in the black buzzing of the flies) or about Wack head down on the slope looking at me with that ridiculous expression his mouth wide open and on which by now the flies must also have had plenty of time to gather probably the pièce de résistance so to speak since he had been dead since morning when that other sabre-wielding idiot had ridden head first into that ambush, thinking fools fools fools, thinking that after all idiocy or intelligence didn’t have much to do with it, I mean with us, I mean with what we think is us and makes us talk act hate love since once it’s gone our body our face goes on expressing what we thought was appropriate to our mind, then maybe those things, I mean intelligence idiocy or being in love or being brave or cowardly or murderous the virtues the passions exist outside of us taking up residence without asking our permission in this clumsy carcass which they possess because even idiocy was apparently something too fine too subtle and somehow too intelligent to belong to Wack, then maybe he had existed only to be Wack-the-idiot, in any case he didn’t have to worry about it any more, poor Wack poor idiot poor fool: I remembered that day that rainy afternoon when we had ourselves a time making him angry arguing to pass the time round that sick horse, it wasn’t the way it is now the sun the heat and I suppose that if they had died then they would have been dissolved and not rotting like carrion, it was raining all the time and now I thought that we were something like virgins, puppies despite the blasphemies, the swear words we used, virgins because the war death I mean everything . . .” (Georges’s arm making a half-circle, his hand leaving his chest, pointing to the swarming interior of the barracks, and on the other side of the dirty windows the tarred wooden partition of another identical barracks, and behind—they couldn’t see them but they knew they were there—the monotonous repetition of the same barracks set approximately every ten yards on the bare plain, aligned, parallel, identical, on each side of what was supposed to be a street, streets intersecting at right angles, making a gridiron, all the barracks facing in the same direction, low, grim, long, and the nauseating smell of rotten potatoes and latrines permanently floating in the air, probably forming—Georges supposed—over the huge square that exhaled it, excremental, stubborn, nasty, a kind of hermetic lid, so that they were—he said—doubly prisoners: first of that barrier of barbed wire stretched between the raw pine poles with the bark still on them, and second of their own infection (or abjection: that of conquered armies, fallen warriors), and both of them (Georges and Blum) sitting with their legs dangling over the edges of their cots, trying to pretend they weren’t hungry (which was still quite easy, because a man can manage to make himself believe almost anything provided it makes life easier for him: but much harder, and even impossible, to convince the rat that ceaselessly gnawed at their stomachs, until, Blum said, it seemed as though there were only two alternatives: get yourself eaten dead by the worms or alive by a starving rat), groping in their pockets in the hope of finding there some forgotten grains of tobacco, taking out the nasty mixture of breadcrumbs dust and lint that lay in the seams, so that they had every reason to wonder if such a thing was supposed to be smoked or eaten, that is, arguing (Georges and Blum) if the rat would deign to swallow it, and finally deciding they would try to smoke it; and around them the incessant murmur, the confused and muddy racket—discussions, bargaining, arguments, bets, obscenities, boasting, recriminations—like, somehow, the breathing (it never stopped, even at night, merely muffled as if under the sleep itself you could still perceive that kind of constant discomfort, that sterile and vain agitation of caged animals) that filled the barracks, and there was music too, an orchestra, a screeching fiddle, bursts of rhythm, strings scraped in time on instruments made from empty tins, pieces of wood and bits of wire (and even real banjos, real guitars brought here and kept God knows how) rising sporadically over the racket (then submerged again, stifled, melting, disappearing into the other sounds—or perhaps they forgot about it, simply forgot to be aware of it?), the same tune, the same measures repeated over and over again, the same refrain rising, repeating itself, monotonous, plaintive, with its nonsensical words, its gay and nostalgic cadence: