"After that," Volpatte went on, "those layers of soft-jobbers fed me
up still more. As a dinner it was all right--cod, seeing it was
Friday, but prepared like soles a la Marguerite--I know all
about it. But the talk!--"
"They call the bayonet Rosalie, don't they?"
"Yes, the padded luneys. But during dinner these gentlemen talked
above all about themselves. Every one, so as to explain why he
wasn't somewhere else, as good as said (but all the while saying
something else and gorging like an ogre), 'I'm ill, I'm feeble, look
at me, ruin that I am. Me, I'm in my dotage.' They were all seeking
inside themselves to find diseases to wrap themselves up in--'I
wanted to go to the war, but I've a rupture, two ruptures, three
ruptures.' Ah, non, that feast!--'The orders that speak of sending
everybody away,' explained a funny man, 'they're like the comedies,'
he explained, 'there's always a last act to clear up all the jobbery
of the others. That third act is this paragraph, "Unless the
requirements of the Departments stand in the way."' There was one
that told this tale, 'I had three friends that I counted on to give
me a lift up. I was going to apply to them; but, one after another,
a little before I put my request, they were killed by the enemy;
look at that,' he says, 'I've no luck!' Another was explaining to
another that, as for him, he would very much have liked to go, but
the surgeon-major had taken him round the waist to keep him by force
in the depot with the auxiliary.
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