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!—­”