At
last, he'd wormed himself in everywhere, he came to be one of the
family, the rotter, the carrion. He did it so he wouldn't have to do
it. He seemed to me like an individual that would have earned five
quid honestly with the same work and bother that he puts into
forging a one-pound note. But there, he'll get his skin out of it
all right, he will. At the front he'd be lost sight of in the throng
of it, but he's not so stupid. Be damned to them, he says, that take
their grub on the ground, and be damned to them still more when
they're under it. When we've all done with fighting, he'll go back
home and he'll say to his friends and neighbors, 'Here I am safe and
sound,' and his pals'll be glad, because be's a good sort, with
engaging manners, contemptible creature that he is, and--and this is
the most stupid thing of all--but he takes you in and you swallow
him whole, the son of a bug.
"And then, those sort of beings, don't you believe there's only one
of them. There are barrels of 'em in every depot, that hang on and
writhe when their time comes to go, and they say, 'I'm not going,'
and they don't go, and they never succeed in driving them as far as
the front."
"Nothing new in all that," said Barque, "we know it, we know it!"
"Then there are the offices," Volpatte went on, engrossed in his
story of travel; "whole houses and streets and districts. I saw that
my little corner in the rear was only a speck, and I had full view
of them.
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