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 chap with airs, spick
as a daisy, with a gold-rimmed spy-glass--eye-glasses with a tape on
them. He was young, but being a re-enlisted soldier, he had the
right not to go to the front. I said to him, 'Sergeant!' But he
didn't hear me, being busy slanging a secretary--it's unfortunate,
mon garcon,' he was saying; 'I've told you twenty times that
you must send one notice of it to be carried out by the Squadron