ape 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 Commander, Provost of the C.A., and
one by way of advice, without signature, but making mention of the
signature, to the Provost of the Force Publique d'Amiens and of the
centers of the district, of which you have the list--in envelopes, of
course, of the general commanding the district. It's very simple,' he
says.

"I'd drawn back three paces to wait till he'd done with jawing. Five
minutes after, I went up to the sergeant. He said to me, 'My dear sir,
I have not the time to bother with you; I have many other matters to
attend to.' As a matter of fact, he was all in a flummox in front of
his typewriter, the chump, because he'd forgotten, he said, to press on
the capital-letter lever, and so, instead of underlining the heading of
his page, he'd damn well scored a line of 8's in the middle of the top.
So he couldn't hear anything, and he played hell with the Americans,
seeing the machine came from there.

"After that, he growled against another woolly-leg, because on the
memorandum of the distribution of maps they hadn't put the names of the
Ration Department, the Cattle Department, and the Administrative Convoy
of the 328th D.I.

"Alongside, a fool was obstinately trying to pull more circulars off a
jellygraph than it would print, doing his damnedest to produce a lot of
ghosts that you could hardly read. Others were talking: 'Where are the
Parisian fasteners?' asked a toff. And they don't call things by their
proper names: 'Tell me now, if you please, what are the elements
quartered at X--?' The elements! What's all that sort of babble?" asked
Volpatte.

"At the end of the big table where these fellows were that I've
mentioned and that I'd been to, and the sergeant floundering about
behind a hillock of papers at the top of it and giving orders, a
simpleton was doing nothing but tap on his blotting-pad with his hands.
His job, the mug, was the department of leave-papers, and as the big
push had begun and all leave was stopped, he hadn't anything to
do--'Capital!' he says.

"And all that, that's one table in one room in one department in one
depot. I've seen more, and then more, and more and m