y have been wont to dip for their
subjects of conversation for ten, fifteen, or twenty years. So that
they still frequent it, even after a year and a half of actual war in
all its forms.

I can hear some of the talk and guess the rest of it. For it is
everlastingly the same sort of tale that they get out of their military
past;--the narrator once shut up a bad-tempered N.C.O. with words of
extreme appropriateness and daring. He wasn't afraid, he spoke out loud
and strong! Some scraps of it reach my ears--

"Alors, d'you think I flinched when Nenoeil said that to me? Not a bit,
my boy. All the pals kept their jaws shut but me; I spoke up, 'Mon
adjudant,' I says, 'it's possible, but--'" A sentence follows that I
cannot secure--"Oh, tu sais, just like that, I said it. He didn't get
shirty; 'Good, that's good,' he says as he hops it, and afterwards he
was as good as all that, with me."

"Just like me, with Dodore, 'jutant of the 13th, when I was on leave--a
mongrel. Now he's at the Pantheon, as caretaker. He'd got it in for me,
so--"

So each unpacks his own little load of historical anecdote. They are
all alike, and not one of them but says, "As for me, I am not like the
others."

* * * * *

The post-orderly! He is a tall and broad man with fat calves;
comfortable looking, and as neat and tidy as a policeman. He is in a
bad temper. There are new orders, and now he has to go every day as far
as Battalion Headquarters. He abuses the order as if it had been
directed exclusively against himself; and he continues to complain even
while he calls up the corporals for the post and maintains his
customary chat en passant with this man and that. And in spite of his
spleen he does not keep to himself all the information with which he
comes provided. While removing the string from the letter-packets he
dispenses his verbal news, and announces first, that according to
rumor, there is a very explicit ban on the wearing of hoods.

"Hear that?" says Tirette to Tirloir. "Got to chuck your fine hood
away!"

"Not likely! I'm not on. That's nothing to do with me," replies the
hooded one, whose pride no less than his comfort is at stake.

"Order of the General Commanding the Army."

"Then let the General give an order that it's not to rain any more. I
want to know nothing about it."

The majority of Orders, even when less peculiar than this one, are
always received in this way--and then carried out.