“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.”