He stooped to the fallen man and helped him to stand straight.
“Be off with you, mon brave, or there will be trouble for you.”
He beckoned to two of his own Chasseurs and said:
“Look after that poor comrade yonder. He is un peu étoilé.”
The crowd applauded. Their sympathy was all for the drunken soldier of France.
V
Into a small estaminet at the end of the rue des Trois Cailloux, beyond the Hôtel de Ville, came one day during the battles of the Somme two poilus, grizzled, heavy men, deeply bronzed, with white dust in their wrinkles, and the earth of the battlefields ingrained in the skin of their big, coarse hands. They ordered two “little glasses” and drank them at one gulp. Then two more.
“See what I have got, my little cabbage,” said one of them, stooping to the heavy pack which he had shifted from his shoulders to the other seat beside him. “It is something to make you laugh.”
“And what is that, my old one?” said a woman sitting on the other side of the marble-topped table, with another woman of her own class, from the market nearby.
The man did not answer the question, but fumbled into his pack, laughing a little in a self-satisfied way.
“I killed a German to get it,” he said. “He was a pig of an officer, a dirty Boche. Very chic, too, and young like a schoolboy.”
One of the women patted him on the shoulder. Her eyes glistened.
“Did you slit his throat, the dirty dog? Eh, I’d like to get my fingers round the neck of a dirty Boche!”
“I finished him with a grenade,” said the poilu. “It was good enough. It knocked a hole in him as large as a cemetery. See then, my cabbage. It will make you smile. It is a funny kind of mascot, eh?”
He put on the table a small leather pouch stained with a blotch of reddish brown. His big, clumsy fingers could hardly undo the little clasp.
“He wore this next his heart,” said the man. “Perhaps he thought it would bring him luck. But I killed him all the same! ’Cré nom de Dieu!”
He undid the clasp, and his big fingers poked inside the flap of the pouch.
“It was from his woman, his German grue. Perhaps even now she doesn’t know he’s dead. She thinks of him wearing this next to his heart. ’Cré nom de Dieu! It was I that killed him a week ago!”
He held up something in his hand, and the light through the estaminet window gleamed on it. It was a woman’s lock of hair, like finespun gold.
The two women gave a shrill cry of surprise, and then screamed with laughter. One of them tried to grab the hair, but the poilu held it high, beyond her reach, with a gruff command of, “Hands off!” Other soldiers and women in the estaminet gathered round staring at the yellow tress, laughing, making ribald conjectures as to the character of the woman from whose head it had come. They agreed that she was fat and ugly, like all German women, and a foul slut.
“She’ll never kiss that fellow again,” said one man. “Our old one has cut the throat of that pig of a Boche!”
“I’d like to cut off all her hair and tear the clothes off her back,” said one of the women. “The dirty drab with yellow hair! They ought to be killed, every one of them, so that the human race should be rid of them!”
“Her lover is a bit of clay, anyhow,” said the other woman. “A bit of dirt, as our poilus will do for all of them.”
The soldier with the woman’s hair in his hand stroked it across his forefinger.
“All the same it is pretty. Like gold, eh? I think of the woman, sometimes. With blue eyes, like a German girl I kissed in Paris—a dancing-girl!”
There was a howl of laughter from the two women.
“The old one is drunk. He is amorous with the German cow!”
“I will keep it as a mascot,” said the poilu, scrunching it up and thrusting it into his pouch. “It’ll keep me in mind of that saligaud of a German officer I killed. He was a chic fellow, tout de même. A boy.”
VI
Australians slouched up the Street of the Three Pebbles with a grim look under their wide-brimmed hats, having come down from Pozières, where it was always hell in the days of the Somme fighting. I liked the look of them, dusty up to the eyes in summer, muddy up to their eyes in winter—these gipsy fellows, scornful of discipline for discipline’s sake, but desperate fighters, as simple as children in their ways of thought and speech (except for frightful oaths), and looking at life, this life of war and this life in Amiens, with frank, curious eyes, and a kind of humorous contempt for death, and disease, and English Tommies, and French girls, and “the whole damned show,” as they called it. They were lawless except for the laws to which their souls gave allegiance. They behaved as the equals of all men, giving no respect to generals or staff-officers or the devils of hell. There was a primitive spirit of manhood in them, and they took what they wanted, and were ready to pay for it in coin or in disease or in wounds. They had no conceit of themselves in a little, vain way, but they reckoned themselves the only fighting-men, simply, and without boasting. They were hard as steel, and finely tempered. Some of them were ruffians, but most of them were, I imagine, like those English yeomen who came into France with the Black Prince, men who lived “rough,” close to nature, of sturdy independence, good-humored, though fierce in a fight, and ruthless. That is how they seemed to me, in a general way, though
