WHEN Volpatte arrived from his sick-leave, after two months' absence,
we surrounded him. But he was sullen and silent, and tried to get away.
"Well, what about it? Volpatte, have you nothing to tell us?"
"Tell us all about the hospital and the sick-leave, old cock, from the
day when you set off in your bandages, with your snout in parenthesis!
You must have seen something of the official shops. Speak then, nome de
Dieu!"
"I don't want to say anything at all about it," said Volpatte.
"What's that? What are you talking about?"
"I'm fed up--that's what I am! The people back there, I'm sick of
them--they make me spew, and you can tell 'em so!"
"What have they done to you?"
"A lot of sods, they are!" says Volpatte.
There he was, with his head as of yore, his ears "stuck on again" and
his Mongolian cheekbones--stubbornly set in the middle of the puzzled
circle that besieged him; and we felt that the mouth fast closed on
ominous silence meant high pressure of seething exasperation in the
depth of him.
Some words overflowed from him at last. He turned round--facing towards
the rear and the bases--and shook his fist at infinite space. "There
are too many of them," he said between his teeth, "there are too many!"
He seemed to be threatening and repelling a rising sea of phantoms.
A little later, we questioned him again, knowing well that his anger
could not thus be retained within, and that the savage silence would
explode at the first chance.
It was in a deep communication trench, away back, where we had come
together for a meal after a morning spent in digging. Torrential rain
was falling. We were muddled and drenched and hustled by the flood, and
we ate standing in single file, without shelter, under the dissolving
sky. Only by feats of skill could we protect the bread and bully from
the spouts that flowed from every point in space; and while we ate we
put our hands and faces as much as possible under our cowls. The rain
rattled and bounced and streamed on our limp woven armor, and worked
with open brutality or sly secrecy into ourselves and our food. Our
feet were sinking farther and farther, taking deep root in the stream
that flowed along the clayey bottom of the trench. Some faces were
laughing, though their mustaches dripped. Others grimaced at the spongy
bread and flabby meat, or at the missiles which attacked their skin
from all sides at every defect in their heavy and miry armor-plate.
Barque, who was hugging his mess-tin to his heart, bawled at Volpatte:
"Well then, a lot of sods, you say, that you've seen down there where
you've been?"
"For instance?" cried Blaire, while a redoubled squall shook and
scattered his words; "what have you seen in the way of sods?"
"There are--" Volpatte began, "and then--there are too many of them,
nom de Dieu! There are--"
He tried to say what was the matter with him, but could only repeat,
"There are too many of them!" oppressed and panting. He swallowed a
pulpy mouthful of bread as if there went with it the disordered and
suffocating mass of his memories.
"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,
swarms 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."
"I'm not crazy--" Volpatte began again.
"P'raps, but you're not fair."
Volpatte felt himself insulted by the word. He started, and raised his
head furiously, and the rain, that was waiting for the chance, took him
plump in the face. "Not fair--me? Not fair--to those dung-hills?"
"Exactly, monsieur," the neighbor replied; "I tell you that you play
hell with them and yet you'd jolly well like to be in the rotters'
place."
"Very likely--but what does that prove, rump-face? To begin with, we,
we've been in danger, and it ought to be our turn for the other. But
they're always the same, I tell you; and then there's young men there,
strong as bulls and poised like wrestlers, and then--there are too many
of them! D'you hear? It's always too many, I say, because it is so."
"Too many? What do you know about it, vilain? These departments and
committees, do you know what they are?"
"I don't know what they are," Volpatte set off again, "but I know--"
"Don't you think they need a crowd to keep all the army's affairs
going?"
"I don't care a damn, but--"
"But you wish it was you, eh?" chaffed the invisible neighbor, who
concealed in the depth of the hood on which the reservoirs of space
were emptying either a supreme indifference or a cruel desire to take a
rise out of Volpatte.
"I can't help it," said the other, simply.
"There's those that can help it for you," interposed the shrill voice
of Barque; "I knew one of 'em--"
"I, too, I've seen 'em!" Volpatte yelled with a desperate effort
through the storm. "Tiens! not far from the front, don't know where
exactly, where there's an ambulance clearing-station and a
sous-intendance--I met the reptile there."