jors, and they were all damnably mad with him. He
told me about it. How did he work it? He'd sit down all of a sudden,
put on a stupid look, do the scrim-shanker stunt, and flop like a
bundle of dirty linen. 'I've got a sort of general fatigue,' he'd
blubber. They didn't know how to take him, and after a bit they just
let him drop--everybody was fit to spew on him. And he changed his
tricks according to the circumstances, d'you catch on? Sometimes he had
something wrong with his foot--he was damned clever with his feet. And
then he contrived things, and he knew one head from another, and how to
take his opportunities. He knew what's what, he did. You could see him
go and slip in like a pretty poilu among the depot chaps, where the
soft jobs were, and stay there; and then he'd put himself out no end to
be useful to the pals. He'd get up at three o'clock in the morning to
make the juice, go and fetch the water while the others were getting
their grub. At last, he'd wormed himself in everywhere, he came to be
one of the family, the rotter, the carrion. He did it so he wouldn't
have to do it. He seemed to me like an individual that would have
earned five quid honestly with the same work and bother that he puts
into forging a one-pound note. But there, he'll get his skin out of it
all right, he will. At the front he'd be lost sight of in the throng of
it, but he's not so stupid. Be damned to them, he says, that take their
grub on the ground, and be damned to them still more when they're under
it. When we've all done with fighting, he'll go back home and he'll say
to his friends and neighbors, 'Here I am safe and sound,' and his
pals'll be glad, because be's a good sort, with engaging manners,
contemptible creature that he is, and--and this is the most stupid
thing of all--but he takes you in and you swallow him whole, the son of
a bug.

"And then, those sort of beings, don't you believe there's only one of
them. There are barrels of 'em in every depot, that hang on and writhe
when their time comes to go, and they say, 'I'm not going,' and they
don't go, and they never succeed in driving them as far as the front."

"Nothing new in all that," said Barque, "we know it, we know it!"

"Then there are the offices," Volpatte went on, engrossed in his story
of travel; "whole houses and streets and districts. I saw that my
little corner in the rear was only a speck, and I had full view of
them. Non, I'd never have believed there'd