A Volunteer Poilu | Page 7

and at both of these a long file of blue-clad poilus waited for the countersigning of their furlough slips and military tickets. The mud of the trenches still stained the bottom edges of their overcoats, and their steel helmets were dented and dull. There was something fine about the faces collectively; there was a certain look of tried endurance and perils bravely borne. I heard those on furlough telling the names of their home villages to the officer in charge,--pleasant old names, Saint-Pierre aux Vignes, La Tour du Roi.
A big, obese, middle-aged civilian dressed in a hideous greenish suit, and wearing a pancake cap, sat opposite me in the compartment I had chosen. There was a hard, unfriendly look in his large, fat-encircled eyes, a big mustache curved straight out over his lips, and the short finger nails of his square, puffy fingers were deeply rimmed with dirt. He caught sight of me reading a copy of an English weekly, and after staring at me with an interest not entirely free from a certain hostility, retreated behind the pages of the "Matin," and began picking his teeth. Possibly he belonged to that provincial and prejudiced handful to whom England will always be "Perfidious Albion," or else he took me for an English civilian dodging military service. The French press was following the English recruiting campaign very closely, and the system of volunteer service was not without its critics. "Conscription being considered in England" (On discute la conscription en Angleterre), announced the "Matin" discreetly.
It was high noon; the train had arrived at Angoul��me, and was taking aboard a crowd of convalescents. On the station platform, their faces relentlessly illumined by the brilliant light, stood about thirty soldiers; a few were leaning on canes, one was without a right arm, some had still the pallor of the sick, others seemed able-bodied and hearty. Every man wore on the bosom of his coat about half a dozen little aluminum medals dangling from bows of tricolor ribbon. "Pour les bless��s, s'il vous pla?t," cried a tall young woman in the costume and blue cape of a Red-Cross nurse as she walked along the platform shaking a tin collection box under the windows of the train.
To our compartment came three of the convalescents. One was a sturdy, farmhand sort of fellow, with yellow hair and a yellow mustache--the kind of man who might have been a Norman; he wore khaki puttees, brown corduroy trousers, and a jacket which fitted his heavy, vigorous figure rather snugly. Another was a little soul dressed in the "blue horizon" from head to foot, a homely little soul with an egg-shaped head, brown-green eyes, a retreating chin, and irregular teeth. The last, wearing the old tenue, black jacket and red trousers, was a good-looking fellow with rather handsome brown eyes. Comfortably stretched in a corner, the Norman was deftly cutting slices of bread and meat which he offered to his companions. Catching sight of my English paper, all three stared at me with an interest and friendliness that was in psychological contrast to the attitude of the obese civilian.
"Anglais?" asked the Norman.
The civilian watched for my answer.
"Non--Am��ricain," I replied.
"Tiens," they said politely.
"Do you speak English?" asked the homely one.
"Yes," I answered.
The Norman fished a creased dirty letter and a slip of paper from his wallet and handed them to me for inspection.
"I found them in a trench we shared with the English," he explained. "These puttees are English; a soldier gave them to me." He exhibited his legs with a good deal of satisfaction.
I examined the papers that had been given me. The first was a medical prescription for an anti-lice ointment and the second an illiterate letter extremely difficult to decipher, mostly about somebody whom the writer was having trouble to manage, "now that you aren't here." I translated as well as I could for an attentive audience. "Toujours les totos," they cried merrily when I explained the prescription. A spirit of good-fellowship pervaded the compartment, till even the suspicious civilian unbent, and handed round post-card photographs of his two sons who were somewhere en Champagne. Not a one of the three soldiers could have been much over twenty-one, but they were not boys, but men, serious men, tried and disciplined by war. The homely one gave me one of his many medals which he wore "to please the good Sisters"; on one side in an oval of seven stars was the Virgin Mary, and on the other, the determined features of General Joffre.
Just at sundown we crossed the great plain of La Beauce. Distant villages and pointed spires stood silhouetted in violet-black against the burning midsummer sky and darkness was falling upon the sweeping golden plain. We passed hamlet after hamlet closed and shuttered, though the harvests had