“When you have been lying out there in the trenches, surely we can wash a sheet,” she goes on.

I look at her, she is young and crisp, spotless and neat, like everything here; a man cannot realize that it isn’t for officers only, and feels himself strange and in some way even alarmed.

All the same the woman is a tormentor, she is going to force me to say it. “It is only⁠—” I try again, surely she must know what I mean.

“What is it then?”

“Because of the lice,” I bawl out at last.

She laughs. “Well, they must have a good day for once, too.”

Now I don’t care any more. I scramble into bed and pull up the covers.

A hand gropes over the bedcover. The sergeant-major. He goes off with the cigars.