"And stand at ease, Dreher!"
I moved my left leg, and smiled in my turn.
Then he began to talk to me in an unexpectedly familiar tone—this man whom I had thought so proud, so incapable of confiding in any one. He told me his whole history, how when quite small he had always longed to be a soldier, how he had been kept back by an illness, and had failed for St. Cyr (I had always thought he had been through it), why he had enlisted.... He loyally reported all his disappointments, and mortifications. It was the last trade in peace time. He appealed to me to corroborate this statement from the knowledge gained from my brother whom I had just lost. Oh, the slow advancement, the insufficient pay, the spirit of jealousy and tyranny...!
He made a speech for the prosecution. The greatest part of the army was a mass of laziness, lies, and intrigue. There were two ways of rising from the ranks: the military school, where hard work did not succeed except when combined with push (except in regard to successes with the fair sex), and the Colonies. He had got himself sent to the Soudan, as an ambitious young subaltern, but at the end of a few months his liver had become inflamed. Weeks of fever, and a long martyrdom at the hospital at Brazzaville had followed, and he had finally been sent back to France with the advice never to set foot in Africa again. It had meant that his life was wrecked—that he must grow old in the dreary atmosphere of little garrison towns.
His tone grew still more bitter when he described the utter boredom, the flat distractions, the lack of any intellectual milieu, and beyond that the moral subjection, the physical over-work. The machine was worn out before its time, one became fit for nothing.
I could not help asking him:
"Why ... can't you clear out in time?"
"Why? Because when once you're in it, you stay there. Made a captain after fifteen years' service, I waited ten more for—can you guess what? A trumpery bit of rubbish, the military cross!"
He continued: