d 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!--"

"They call the bayonet Rosalie, don't they?"

"Yes, the padded luneys. But during dinner these gentlemen talked above
all about themselves. Every one, so as to explain why he wasn't
somewhere else, as good as said (but all the while saying something
else and gorging like an ogre), 'I'm ill, I'm feeble, look at me, ruin
that I am. Me, I'm in my dotage.' They were all seeking inside
themselves to find diseases to wrap themselves up in--'I wanted to go
to the war, but I've a rupture, two ruptures, three ruptures.' Ah, non,
that feast!--'The orders that speak of sending everybody away,'
explained a funny man, 'they're like the comedies,' he explained,
'there's always a last act to clear up all the jobbery of the others.
That third act is this paragraph, "Unless the requirements of the
Departments stand in the way."' There was one that told this tale, 'I
had three friends that I counted on to give me a lift up. I was going
to apply to them; but, one after another, a little before I put my
request, they were killed by the enemy; look at that,' he says, 'I've
no luck!' Another was explaining to another that, as for him, he would
very muc