'God rot it,' said the mayor. 'So that's going to start again.'

'I've been through one war,' said Daddy Croulard. 'Fifty-two months and not a scratch.' He crinkled his eyes in glee at the recollection.

'That's all right,' said the mayor. 'You did the other one, you won't do this one. Besides, you don't need to worry about requisitions.'

The lieutenant tapped authoritatively on the table. 'Well, get on with it.'

The mayor looked bewildered. He had slipped his hands into his scarf and tried to look important: 'The drummer is ill,' he explained.

'I can play the drum,' said Daddy Croulard. He smiled. For ten years it had been his ambition to play the drum.

'Drum?' said the lieutenant. 'You'll have the tocsin rung - that's what you'll do.'

Chamberlain was asleep, Mathieu was asleep, the Kabyle put the ladder against the charabanc, hoisted the trunk on to his shoulder, and scrambled up it without holding on to the rungs. Ivich was asleep, Daniel swung his legs out of bed, a bell echoed in his head, Pierre looked at the pink and black soles of the Kabyle's feet, and thought: 'It's Maud's trunk.' But Maud wasn't there, she was to leave a little later with Doucette, France, and Ruby in the car of a rich elderly gentleman in love with Ruby: in Paris, Nantes and Mâcon men were pasting white notices on to walls, the tocsin was ringing in Crévilly, Hitler was asleep, Hitler was a little four-year-old child, wearing his best suit, a black dog passed, he tried to catch it in his butterfly-net: the tocsin rang, Madame Reboulier awoke with a start and said:

'There's something burning.'

Hitler was asleep, he was slitting his father's trousers into narrow strips with a pair of nail scissors. Leni von Riefenstahl came in, picked up the strips of flannel, and said: 'I'll make you eat them in a salad.'

The tocsin rang and rang and rang. Maublanc said to his wife: 'I bet the sawmill's caught fire.'

He went out into the street. Madame Reboulier, in a pink nightdress, peered through the shutters

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	Part of the Library of Bernadette Tavernin - © 1999