"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 much have liked to go, but
the surgeon-major had taken him round the waist to keep him by force
in the depot with the auxiliary. 'Eh bien,' he says, 'I resigned
myself. After all, I shall be of greater value in putting my
intellect to the service of the country than in carrying a
knapsack.' And him that was alongside said, 'Oui,' with his
headpiece feathered on top. He'd jolly well consented to go to
Bordeaux at the time when the Boches were getting near Paris, and
then Bordeaux became the stylish place; but afterwards he returned
firmly to the front--to Paris--and said something like this, 'My
ability is of value to France; it is absolutely necessary that I
guard it for France.'

"They talked about other people that weren't there--of the