"Is it the shirkers you want to talk about?"
"By God!" He had thrown the rest of his beef over the parapet, and
this cry, this gasp, escaped violently from his mouth as if from a
valve.
"Don't worry about the soft-job brigade, old cross-patch," advised
Barque, banteringly, but not without some bitterness. "What good
does it do?"
Concealed and huddled up under the fragile and unsteady roof of his
oiled hood, while the water poured down its shining slopes, and
holding his empty mess-tin out for the rain to clean it, Volpatte
snarled, "I'm not daft--not a bit of it--and I know very well
there've got to be these individuals at the rear. Let them have
their dead-heads for all I care--but there's too many of them, and
they're all alike, and all rotters, voila!"
Relieved by this affirmation, which shed a little light on the
gloomy farrago of fury he was loosing among us, Volpatte began to
speak in fragments across the relentless sheets of rain--
"At the very first village they sent me to, I saw duds, and duds
galore, and they began to get on my nerves. All sorts of departments
and sub-departments and managements and centers and offices and
committees--you're no sooner there than you meet swarms of fools,
swam-ms of different services that are only different in name-enough
to turn your brain. I tell you, the man that invented the names of
all those committees, he was wrong in his head.
"So could I help but be sick of it? Ah, mon vieux," said our
comrade, musing, "all those individuals fiddle-faddling and making
believe down there, all spruced up with their fine caps and
officers' coats and shameful boots, that gulp dainties and can put a
dram of best brandy down their gullets whenever they want, and wash
themselves oftener twice than once, and go to church, and never stop
smoking, and pack themselves up in feathers at night to read the
newspaper--and then they say afterwards, 'I've been in the war!'"
One point above all had got hold of Volpatte and emerged from his
confused and impassioned vision: "All those soldiers, they haven't
to run away with their table-tools and get a bite any old
way--they've got to be at their ease--they'd rather go and sit
themselves down with some tart in the district, at a special
reserved table, and guzzle vegetables, and the fine lady puts their
crockery out all square for them on the dining-table, and their pots
of jam and every other blasted thing to eat; in short, the
advantages of riches and peace in that doubly-damned hell they call
the Rear!"
Volpatte's neighbor shook his head under the torrents that fell from
heaven and said," So much the better for them.
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