“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