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, 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.