At that moment there was a lull, and the weather allowed Volpatte to
talk after a fashion. He said: "He took me round all the jumble of the
depot as if it was a fair, although he was one of the sights of the
place. He led me along the passages and into the dining-rooms of houses
and supplementary barracks. He half opened doors with labels on them,
and said, 'Look here, and here too--look!' I went inspecting with him,
but he didn't go back, like I did, to the trenches, don't fret
yourself, and he wasn't coming back from them either, don't worry! The
reptile, the first time I saw him he was walking nice and leisurely in
the yard--'I'm in the Expenses Department,' he says. We talked a bit,
and the next day he got an orderly job so as to dodge getting sent
away, seeing it was his turn to go since the beginning of the war.
"On the step of the door where he'd laid all night on a feather bed, he
was polishing the pumps of his monkey master--beautiful yellow
pumps--rubbing 'em with paste, fairly glazing 'em, my boy. I stopped to
watch him, and the chap told me all about himself. Mon vieux, I don't
remember much more of the stuffing that came out of his crafty skull
than I remember of the History of France and the dates we whined at
school. Never, I tell you, had he been sent to the front, although he
was Class 1903, [note 1] and a lusty devil at that, he was. Danger and
dog-tiredness and all the ugliness of war--not for him, but for the
others, oui. He knew damned well that if he set foot in the
firing-line, the line would see that the beast got it, so he ran like
hell from it, and stopped where he was. He said they'd tried all ways
to get him, but he'd given the slip to all the captains, all the
colonels, all the majors, and they were all damnably mad with him. He
told me about it. How did he work it? He'd sit down all of a sudden,
put on a stupid look, do the scrim-shanker stunt, and flop like a
bundle of dirty linen. 'I've got a sort of general fatigue,' he'd
blubber. They didn't know how to take him, and after a bit they just
let him drop--everybody was fit to spew on him. And he changed his
tricks according to the circumstances, d'you catch on? Sometimes he had
something wrong with his foot--he was damned clever with his feet. And
then he contrived things, and he knew one head from another, and how to
take his opportunities. He knew what's what, he did. You could see him
go and slip in like a pretty poilu among the depot chaps, where the
soft jobs were, and stay there; and then he'd put himself out no end to
be useful to the pals. He'd get up at three o'clock in the morning to
make the juice, go and fetch the water while the others were getting
their grub. 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. Non, I'd never have believed there'd be so many men on chairs
while war was going on--"
A hand protruded from the rank and made trial of space--"No more sauce
falling"--"Then we're going out, bet your life on it." So "March!" was
the cry.
The storm held its peace. We filed off in the long narrow swamp
stagnating in the bottom of the trench where the moment before it had
shaken under slabs of rain. Volpatte's grumbling began again amidst our
sorry stroll and the eddies of floundering feet. I listened to him as I
watched the shoulders of a poverty-stricken overcoat swaying in front
of me, drenched through and through. This time Volpatte was on the
track of the police--
"The farther you go from the front the more you see of them."
"Their battlefield is not the same as ours."
Tulacque had an ancient grudge against them. "Look," he said, "how the
bobbies spread themselves about to get good lodgings and good food, and
then, after the drinking regulations, they dropped on the secret
wine-sellers. You saw them lying in wait, with a corner of an eye on
the shop-doors, to see if there weren't any poilus slipping quietly
out, two-faced that they are, leering to left and to right and licking
their mustaches."
"There are good ones among 'em. I knew one in my country, the Cote
d'Or, where I--"
"Shut up!" was Tulacque's peremptory interruption; "they're all alike.
There isn't one that can put another right."
"Yes, they're lucky," said Volpatte, "but do you think they're
contented? Not a bit; they grouse. At least," he corrected himself,
"there was one I met, and he was a grouser. He was devilish bothered by
the drill-manual. 'It isn't worth while to learn the drill
instruction,' he said, 'they're always changing it. F'r instance, take
the department of military police; well, as soon as you've got the gist
of it, it's something else. Ah, when will this war be over?' he says."
"They do what they're told to do, those chaps," ventured Eudore.
"Surely. It isn't their fault at all. It doesn't alter the fact that
these professional soldiers, pensioned and decorated in the time when
we're only civvies, will have made war in a damned funny way."
"That reminds me of a forester that I saw as well," said Volpatte, "who
played hell about the fatigues they put him to. 'It's disgusting,' the
fellow said to me, 'what they do with us. We're old non-coms., soldiers
that have done four years of service at least. We're paid on the higher
scale, it's true, but what of that? We are Officials, and yet they
humiliate us. At H.Q. they set us to cleaning, and carrying the dung
away. The civilians see the treatment they inflict on us, and they look
down on us. And if you look like grousing, they'll actually talk about
sending you off to the trenches, like foot-soldiers! What's going to
become of our prestige? When we go back to the parishes as rangers
after the war--if we do come back from it--the people of the villages
and forests will say, "Ah, it was you that was sweeping the streets at
X--!" To get back our prestige, compromised by human injustice and
ingratitude, I know well,' he says, 'that we shall have to make
complaints, and make complaints and make 'em with all our might, to the
rich and to the influential!' he says."
"I knew a gendarme who was all right," said Lamuse. "'The police are
temperate enough in general,' he says, 'but there are always dirty
devils everywhere, pas? The civilian is really afraid of the gendarme,'
says he, 'and that's a fact; and so, I admit it, there are some who
take advantage of it, and those ones--the tag-rag of the
gendarmerie--know where to get a glass or two. If I was Chief or
Brigadier, I'd screw 'em down; not half I wouldn't,' he says; 'for
public opinion,' he says again, 'lays the blame on the whole force when
a single one with a grievance makes a complaint.'"
"As for me," says Paradis, "one of the worst days of my life was once
when I saluted a gendarme, taking him for a lieutenant, with his white
stripes. Fortunately--I don't say it to console myself, but because
it's probably true--fortunately, I don't think he saw me."
A silence. "Oui, 'vidently," the men murmured; "but what about it? No
need to worry."
* * * * *
A little later, when we were seated along a wall, with our backs to the
stones, and our feet plunged and planted in the ground, Volpatte
continued unloading his impressions.
"I went into a big room that was a Depot office--bookkeeping
department, I believe. It swarmed with tables, and people in it like in
a market. Clouds of talk. All along the walls on each side and in the
middle, personages sitting in front of their spread-out goods like
waste-paper merchants. I put in a request to be put back into my
regiment, and they said to me, 'Take your damned hook, and get busy
with it.' I lit on a sergeant, a little chap with airs, spick as a
daisy, with a gold-rimmed spy-glass--eye-glasses with a tape on them.
He was young, but being a re-enlisted soldier, he had the right not to
go to the front. I said to him, 'Sergeant!' But he didn't hear me,
being busy slanging a secretary--it's unfortunate, mon garcon,' he was
saying; 'I've told you twenty times that you must send one notice of it
to be carried out by the Squadron Commander, Provost of the C.A., and
one by way of advice, without signature, but making mention of the
signature, to the Provost of the Force Publique d'Amiens and of the
centers of the district, of which you have the list--in envelopes, of
course, of the general commanding the district. It's very simple,' he
says.
"I'd drawn back three paces to wait till he'd done with jawing. Five
minutes after, I went up to the sergeant. He said to me, 'My dear sir,
I have not the time to bother with you; I have many other matters to
attend to.' As a matter of fact, he was all in a flummox in front of
his typewriter, the chump, because he'd forgotten, he said, to press on
the capital-letter lever, and so, instead of underlining the heading of
his page, he'd damn well scored a line of 8's in the middle of the top.
So he couldn't hear anything, and he played hell with the Americans,
seeing the machine came from there.
"After that, he growled against another woolly-leg, because on the
memorandum of the distribution of maps they hadn't put the names of the
Ration Department, the Cattle Department, and the Administrative Convoy
of the 328th D.I.
"Alongside, a fool was obstinately trying to pull more circulars off a
jellygraph than it would print, doing his damnedest to produce a lot of
ghosts that you could hardly read. Others were talking: 'Where are the
Parisian fasteners?' asked a toff. And they don't call things by their
proper names: 'Tell me now, if you please, what are the elements
quartered at X--?' The elements! What's all that sort of babble?" asked
Volpatte.
"At the end of the big table where these fellows were that I've
mentioned and that I'd been to, and the sergeant floundering about
behind a hillock of papers at the top of it and giving orders, a
simpleton was doing nothing but tap on his blotting-pad with his hands.
His job, the mug, was the department of leave-papers, and as the big
push had begun and all leave was stopped, he hadn't anything to
do--'Capital!' he says.
"And all that, that's one table in one room in one department in one
depot. I've seen more, and then more, and more and more again. I don't
know, but it's enough to drive you off your nut, I tell you."
"Have they got brisques?" [note 2]
"Not many there, but in the department of the second line every one had
'em. You had museums of 'em there--whole Zoological Gardens of stripes."
"Prettiest thing I've seen in the way of stripes," said Tulacque, "was
a motorist, dressed in cloth that you'd have said was satin, with new
stripes, and the leathers of an English officer, though a second-class
soldier as he was. With his finger on his cheek, he leaned with his
elbows on that fine carriage adorned with windows that he was the valet
de chambre of. He'd have made you sick, the dainty beast. He was just
exactly the poilu that you see pictures of in the ladies' papers--the
pretty little naughty papers."
Each has now his memories, his tirade on this much-excogitated subject
of the shirkers, and all begin to overflow and to talk at once. A
hubbub surrounds the foot of the mean wall where we are heaped like
bundles, with a gray, muddy, and trampled spectacle lying before us,
laid waste by rain.
"--orderly in waiting to the Road Department, then at the Bakery, then
cyclist to the Revictualing Department of the Eleventh Battery."
"--every morning he had a note to take to the Service de l'Intendance,
to the Gunnery School, to the Bridges Department, and in the evening to
the A.D. and the A.T.--that was all."
"--when I was coming back from leave,' said that orderly, 'the women
cheered us at all the level-crossing gates that the train passed.'
'They took you for soldiers,' I said."
"--'Ah,' I said, 'you're called up, then, are you?' 'Certainly,' he
says to me, 'considering that I've been a round of meetings in America
with a Ministerial deputation. P'raps it's not exactly being called up,
that? Anyway, mon ami,' he says, 'I don't pay any rent, so I must be
called up.' 'And me--'"
"To finish," cries Volpatte, silencing the hum with his authority of a
traveler returned from "down there," "to finish, I saw a whole legion
of 'em all together at a blow-out. For two days I was a sort of helper
in the kitchen of one of the centers of the C.O.A., 'cos they couldn't
let me do nothing while waiting for my reply, which didn't hurry,
seeing they'd sent another inquiry and a super-inquiry after it, and
the reply had too many halts to make in each office, going and coming.
"In short, I was cook in the shop. Once I waited at table, seeing that
the head cook had just got back from leave for the fourth time and was
tired. I saw and I heard those people every time I went into the
dining-room, that was in the Prefecture, and all that hot and
illuminated row got into my head. They were only auxiliaries in there,
but there were plenty of the armed service among the number, too. They
were almost all old men, with a few young ones besides, sitting here
and there.
"I'd begun to get about enough of it when one of the broomsticks said,
'The shutters must be closed; it's more prudent.' My boy, they were a
lump of a hundred and twenty-five miles from the firing-line, but that
pock-marked puppy he wanted to make believe there was danger of
bombardment by aircraft--"
"And there's my cousin," said Tulacque, fumbling, "who wrote to
me--Look, here's what he says: 'Mon cher Adolphe, here I am definitely
settled in Paris as attache to Guard-Room 60. While you are down there.
I must stay in the capital at the mercy of a Taube or a Zeppelin!'"
The phrase sheds a tranquil delight abroad, and we assimilate it like a
tit-bit, laughing.
"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. 'Eh
bien,' he says, 'I resigned myself. After all, I shall be of greater
value in putting my intellect to the service of the country than in
carrying a knapsack.' And him that was alongside said, 'Oui,' with his
headpiece feathered on top. He'd jolly well consented to go to Bordeaux
at the time when the Boches were getting near Paris, and then Bordeaux
became the stylish place; but afterwards he returned firmly to the
front--to Paris--and said something like this, 'My ability is of value
to France; it is absolutely necessary that I guard it for France.'
"They talked about other people that weren't there--of the commandant
who was getting an impossible temper, and they explained that the more
imbecile he got the harsher he got; and the General that made
unexpected inspections with the idea of kicking all the soft-jobbers
out, but who'd been laid up for eight days, very ill--'he's certainly
going to die; his condition no longer gives rise to any uneasiness,'
they said, smoking the cigarettes that Society swells send to the
depots for the soldiers at the front. 'D'you know,' they said, 'little
Frazy, who is such a nice boy, the cherub, he's at last found an excuse
for staying behind. They wanted some cattle slaughterers for the
abattoir, and he's enlisted himself in there for protection, although
he's got a University degree and in spite of being an attorney's clerk.
As for Flandrin's son, he's succeeded in getting himself attached to
the roadmenders.--Roadmender, him? Do you think they'll let him stop
so?' 'Certain sure,' replies one of the cowardly milksops. 'A
road-mender's job is for a long time.'
"Talk about idiots," Marthereau growls.
"And they were all jealous, I don't know why, of a chap called Bourin.
Formerly he moved in the best Parisian circles. He lunched and dined in
the city. He made eighteen calls a day, and fluttered about the
drawing-rooms from afternoon tea till daybreak. He was indefatigable in
leading cotillons, organizing festivities, swallowing theatrical shows,
without counting the motoring parties, and all the lot running with
champagne. Then the war came. So he's no longer capable, the poor boy,
of staying on the look-out a bit late at an embrasure, or of cutting
wire. He must stay peacefully in the warm. And then, him, a Parisian,
to go into the provinces and bury himself in the trenches! Never in
this world! 'I realize, too,' replied an individual, 'that at
thirty-seven I've arrived at the age when I must take care of myself!'
And while the fellow was saying that, I was thinking of Dumont the
gamekeeper, who was forty-two, and was done in close to me on Hill 132,
so near that after he got the handful of bullets in his head, my body
shook with the trembling of his."
"And what were they like with you, these thieves?"
"To hell with me, it was, but they didn't show it too much, only now
and again when they couldn't hold themselves in. They looked at me out
of the corner of their eyes, and took damn good care not to touch me in
passing, for I was still war-mucky.
"It disgusted me a bit to be in the middle of that heap of
good-for-nothings, but I said to myself, 'Come, it's only for a bit,
Firmin.' There was just one time that I very near broke out with the
itch, and that was when one of 'em said, 'Later, when we return, if we
do return.'--NO! He had no right to say that. Sayings like that, before
you let them out of your gob, you've got to earn them; it's like a
decoration. Let them get cushy jobs, if they like, but not play at
being men in the open when they've damned well run away. And you hear
'em discussing the battles, for they're in closer touch than you with
the big bugs and with the way the war's managed; and afterwards, when
you return, if you do return, it's you that'll be wrong in the middle
of all that crowd of humbugs, with the poor little truth that you've
got.
"Ah, that evening, I tell you, all those heads in the reek of the
light, the foolery of those people enjoying life and profiting by
peace! It was like a ballet at the theater or the make-believe of a
magic lantern. There were--there were--there are a hundred thousand
more of them," Volpatte at last concluded in confusion.
But the men who were paying for the safety of the others with their
strength and their lives enjoyed the wrath that choked him, that
brought him to bay in his corner, and overwhelmed him with the
apparitions of shirkers.
"Lucky he doesn't start talking about the factory hands who've served
their apprenticeship in the war, and all those who've stayed at home
under the excuse of National Defense, that was put on its feet in five
secs!" murmured Tirette; "he'd keep us going with them till Doomsday."
"You say there are a hundred thousand of them, flea-bite," chaffed
Barque. "Well, in 1914--do you hear me?--Millerand, the War Minister,
said to the M.P.'s, 'There are no shirkers.'"
"Millerand!" growled Volpatte. "I tell you, I don't know the man; but
if he said that, he's a dirty sloven, sure enough!"
* * * * *
"One is always," said Bertrand, "a shirker to some one else."
"That's true; no matter what you call yourself, you'll
always--always--find worse blackguards and better blackguards than
yourself."
"All those that never go up to the trenches, or those who never go into
the first line, and even those who only go there now and then, they're
shirkers, if you like to call 'em so, and you'd see how many there are
if they only gave stripes to the real fighters."
"There are two hundred and fifty to each regiment of two battalions,"
said Cocon.
"There are the orderlies, and a bit since there were even the servants
of the adjutants."--"The cooks and the under-cooks."--"The
sergeant-majors, and the quartermaster-sergeants, as often as
not."--"The mess corporals and the mess fatigues."--"Some office-props
and the guard of the colors."--"The baggage-masters." "The drivers, the
laborers, and all the section, with all its non-coms., and even the
sappers."--"The cyclists." "Not all of them."--"Nearly all the Red
Cross service."--"Not the stretcher-bearers, of course; for they've not
only got a devilish rotten job, but they live with the companies, and
when attacks are on they charge with their stretchers; but the hospital
attendants."
"Nearly all parsons, especially at the rear. For, you know, parsons
with knapsacks on, I haven't seen a devil of a lot of 'em, have you?"
"Nor me either. In the papers, but not here."
"There are some, it seems."--"Ah!"
"Anyway, the common soldier's taken something on in this war."
"There are others that are in the open. We're not the only ones."
"We are!" said Tulacque, sharply; "we're almost the only ones!"
He added, "You may say--I know well enough what you'll tell me--that it
was the motor lorries and the heavy artillery that brought it off at
Verdun. It's true, but they've got a soft job all the same by the side
of us. We're always in danger, against their once, and we've got the
bullets and the bombs, too, that they haven't. The heavy artillery
reared rabbits near their dug-outs, and they've been making themselves
omelettes for eighteen months. We are really in danger. Those that only
get a bit of it, or only once, aren't in it at all. Otherwise,
everybody would be. The nursemaid strolling the streets of Paris would
be, too, since there are the Taubes and the Zeppelins, as that
pudding-head said that the pal was talking about just now."
"In the first expedition to the Dardanelles, there was actually a
chemist wounded by a shell. You don't believe me, but it's true all the
same--an officer with green facings, wounded!"
"That's chance, as I wrote to Mangouste, driver of a remount horse for
the section, that got wounded--but it was done by a motor lorry."
"That's it, it's like that. After all, a bomb can tumble down on a
pavement, in Paris or in Bordeaux."
"Oui, oui; so it's too easy to say, 'Don't let's make distinctions in
danger!' Wait a bit. Since the beginning, there are some of those
others who've got killed by an unlucky chance; among us there are some
that are still alive by a lucky chance. It isn't the same thing, that,
seeing that when you're dead, it's for a long time."
"Yes," says Tirette, "but you're getting too venomous with your stories
of shirkers. As long as we can't help it, it's time to turn over. I'm
thinking of a retired forest-ranger at Cherey, where we were last
month, who went about the streets of the town spying everywhere to rout
out some civilian of military age, and he smelled out the dodgers like
a mastiff. Behold him pulling up in front of a sturdy goodwife that had
a mustache, and he only sees her mustache, so he bullyrags her--'Why
aren't you at the front, you?'"
"For my part," says Pepin, "I don't fret myself about the shirkers or
the semi-shirkers, it's wasting one's time; but where they get on my
nerves, it's when they swank. I'm of Volpatte's opinion. Let 'em shirk,
good, that's human nature; but afterwards they shouldn't say, 'I've
been a soldier.' Take the engages, [note 3] for instance--"
"That depends on the engages. Those who have offered for the infantry
without conditions, I look up to those men as much as to those that
have got killed; but the engages in the departments or special arms,
even in the heavy artillery, they begin to get my back up. We know 'em!
When they're doing the agreeable in their social circle, they'll say,
'I've offered for the war.'--'Ah, what a fine thing you have done; of
your own free will you have defied the machine-guns! '--'Well, yes,
madame la marquise, I'm built like that!' Eh, get out of it, humbug!"
"Oui, it's always the same tale. They wouldn't be able to say in the
drawing-rooms afterwards, 'Tenez, here I am; look at me for a voluntary
engage!'"
"I know a gentleman who enlisted in the aerodromes. He had a fine
uniform--he'd have done better to offer for the Opera-Comique. What am
I saying--'he'd have done better?' He'd have done a damn sight better,
oui. At least he'd have made other people laugh honestly, instead of
making them laugh with the spleen in it."
"They're a lot of cheap china, fresh painted, and plastered with
ornaments and all sorts of falderals, but they don't go under fire."
"If there'd only been people like those, the Boches would be at
Bayonne."
"When war's on, one must risk his skin, eh, corporal?"
"Yes," said Bertrand, "there are some times when duty and danger are
exactly the same thing; when the country, when justice and liberty are
in danger, it isn't in taking shelter that you defend them. On the
contrary, war means danger of death and sacrifice of life for
everybody, for everybody; no one is sacred. One must go for it,
upright, right to the end, and not pretend to do it in a fanciful
uniform. These services at the bases, and they're necessary, must be
automatically guaranteed by the really weak and the really old."
"Besides, there are too many rich and influential people who have
shouted, 'Let us save France!--and begin by saving ourselves!' On the
declaration of war, there was a big rush to get out of it, that's what
there was, and the strongest succeeded. I noticed myself, in my little
corner, it was especially those that jawed most about patriotism
previously. Anyway, as the others were saying just now, if they get
into a funk-hole, the worst filthiness they can do is to make people
believe they've run risks. 'Cos those that have really run risks, they
deserve the same respect as the dead."
"Well, what then? It's always like that, old man; you can't change
human nature."
"It can't be helped. Grouse, complain? Tiens! talking about
complaining, did you know Margoulin?"
"Margoulin? The good sort that was with us, that they left to die at le
Crassier because they thought he was dead?"
"Well, he wanted to make a complaint. Every day he talked about
protesting against all those things to the captain and the commandant.
He'd say after breakfast, 'I'll go and say it as sure as that pint of
wine's there.' And a minute later, 'If I don't speak, there's never a
pint of wine there at all.' And if you were passing later you'd hear
him again, 'Tiens! is that a pint of wine there? Well, you'll see if I
don't speak! Result--he said nothing at all. You'll say, 'But he got
killed.' True, but previously he had God's own time to do it two
thousand times if he'd dared."
"All that, it makes me ill," growled Blaire, sullen, but with a flash
of fury.
"We others, we've seen nothing--seeing that we don't see anything--but
if we did see--!"
"Old chap," Volpatte cried, "those depots--take notice of what I
say--you'd have to turn the Seine, the Garonne, the Rhone and the Loire
into them to clean them. In the interval, they're living, and they live
well, and they go to doze peacefully every night, every night!"
The soldier held his peace. In the distance he saw the night as they
would pass it--cramped up, trembling with vigilance in the deep
darkness, at the bottom of the listening-hole whose ragged jaws showed
in black outline all around whenever a gun hurled its dawn into the sky.