f that? We are Officials, and yet they
humiliate us. At H.Q. they set us to cleaning, and carrying the dung
away. The civilians see the treatment they inflict on us, and they look
down on us. And if you look like grousing, they'll actually talk about
sending you off to the trenches, like foot-soldiers! What's going to
become of our prestige? When we go back to the parishes as rangers
after the war--if we do come back from it--the people of the villages
and forests will say, "Ah, it was you that was sweeping the streets at
X--!" To get back our prestige, compromised by human injustice and
ingratitude, I know well,' he says, 'that we shall have to make
complaints, and make complaints and make 'em with all our might, to the
rich and to the influential!' he says."

"I knew a gendarme who was all right," said Lamuse. "'The police are
temperate enough in general,' he says, 'but there are always dirty
devils everywhere, pas? The civilian is really afraid of the gendarme,'
says he, 'and that's a fact; and so, I admit it, there are some who
take advantage of it, and those ones--the tag-rag of the
gendarmerie--know where to get a glass or two. If I was Chief or
Brigadier, I'd screw 'em down; not half I wouldn't,' he says; 'for
public opinion,' he says again, 'lays the blame on the whole force 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 t