Page:Ambulance 464 by Julien Bryan.djvu/223

 I was to ride back to Ferme de Piemont with him and he left shortly afterwards. Like some of the poilus, we have the craze for unloading everything we think would make a good souvenir. Every day somebody brings in a hand-grenade or a new kind of fuse and there is always somebody foolish enough to monkey with it. I suppose we have carried five or six poilus already, wounded as they were taking something apart and yet we go right ahead with it. Today Payne offered Frazer the revolver which he borrowed from the little armory in the barn at Suippes if the latter would unload his big Boche torpedo. And although he had only two days more to spend in the section and didn't know a single thing about the construction of the affair, since it was German, he put it in a vise in the tool-room, and took it apart with a pipe-wrench. It could have gone off just as well as not and he wouldn't have been any the wiser. It doesn't wound like a hand grenade, it kills.