IBPS RRB Office Assistant Model Paper 2

Directions (Q. 121-135):
Read the following passage and answer the questionsgiven below it. Certain words/ phrases in the passage have been printed in boldto help you locate them while answering some of the questions.
Mare Rodin flicked-off the switch of his transistor radio and rose from the table,leaving the breakfast tray almost untouched. He walked over to the window, litanother in the endless chain of cigarettes and gazed out of the snow-en-crustedlandscape which the late arriving spring had not yet started to dismantle.He murmured a word quietly and with great venom, following up with greatstrong nouns and epithets that expressed his feeling towards the French President, hisGovernment and the Action Service.
Rodin was unlike his predecessor in almost every way. Tall and spare, with acadaverous face hollowed by the hatred within, he usually masked his emotions withan un-Latin frigidity. For him there had been no Ecole Polytechnic to open doors topromotion. The son of a cobbler, he had escaped to England by fishing boat in thehalcyon days of his late teens when the Germans overran France, and had enlisted asa private soldier under the banner of the Cross of Lorraine.
Promotion through sergeant to warrant officer had come the hard way, in bloodybattles across the face on North Africa under Koenig and later through the hedgerowsof Normandy with Lecher. A field commission during the fight for Paris had got himthe officer's chevrons his education and breeding could never have obtained and inpost-war France the choice had been between reverting to civilian life or staying inthe Army.
But revert to what? He had no trade but that of cobbler which his father hadtaught him, and he found the working class of his native country dominated byCommunists, who had also taken over the Resistance and the Free French of theInterior. So he stayed in the Army, later to experience the bitterness of an officer fromthe ranks who saw a new young generation from the officer schools, earning intheoretical lessons carried out in classrooms the same chevrons he had sweated bloodfor. As he wanted them pass him in tank and privilege the bitterness started to set in.
There was only one thing left to do, and that was join one of the colonialregiments, the tough crack soldiers who did the fight while the conscript armyparaded round drill squares. He managed a transfer to the colonial paratroops.
Within a year he had been a company commander in Indo-China, living amongother men who spoke and through as he did. For a young man from a cobbler's bench,promotion could still be obtained through combat, and more combat. By the end of theIndo-China campaign he was a major and after an unhappy and frustrating year inFrance he was sent to Algeria.
The French withdrawal from Indo-China and the year he spent in France hadturned his latent bitterness into a consuming loathing of politicians and Communists,whom he regarded as one and the same thing. Not until Franco was ruled by a soldiershe ever be weaned away from the grip of the traitors and lickspittles who permeatedher public life. Only in the Army were both breeds extinct.
Like most combat officers who had seen their men die and occasionally buriedthe hideously mutilated bodies of those unlucky enough to be taken alive. Rodin workshipped soldiers as the true salt of the earth, the men who sacrificed themselves inblood so that the bourgeoisie could live at home in comfort. To learn from thecivilians of native land after eight years of combat in the forest of Indo-China thatmost of them cared not a fig for the soldier, to read the denunciations of the militaryby the left-wing intellectuals for more trifles like the torturing of prisoners to obtainvital information, had set off inside Marc Rodin a reaction which combined with thenative bitterness stemming from his own lack of opportunity, had turned into zealotry.
He remained convinced that given enough backing by the civil authorities on thespot and the Government and people back home, the Army could have beaten theViet-Minh. The cession of Indo-China had been a massive betrayal of the thousands offine young men who had died there seemingly for nothing. For Rodin there would be,could be, no more betrayals. Algeria would prove it. He left the shore of Marseilles inthe spring of 1956 as near a happy man as he would ever be, convinced that the distanthills of Algeria would see the consummation of what he regarded as his life's work, theapotheosis of his life's work, the apotheosis of the French Army in the eye of the world.