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,
swarms