Wooden Crosses | Page 5

frock-coat, and was very carefully
cutting away the skirts.
"That's true, we are making war," repeated the new chum, clinking
glasses with Broucke.

And looking at Sulphart in his drawers of fine lawn, he began to laugh.
"Nobody would think of it," said he. "There's lots of fun up at the front.
I was certain I wouldn't be nearly as bored as in barracks."
BrŽval, whose hollow face had resumed his two deep lines of anguish
down his cheeks, looked at him and shook his head.
"You don't suppose that it's like this every day, do you? You'd be very
far out if you did, you know."
His nose buried in his cup, Fouillard was guffawing. Sulphart the
sympathetic only shrugged his shoulders.
"That's not so certain," said he.
"If you had struck Charleroi like me," said Lagny to him, Lagny with
his shrivelled old woman's face, "you wouldn't have been in such a
hurry to get back to the front."
"And all the same you weren't in the retreat, you weren't," interrupted
Vairon. "I take my oath that was no rest-camp."
"Aye, that was the stiffest of all, that was," agreed Lemoine.
"And the Marne?" asked Demachy.
"The Marne, that was nothing at all," said Sulphart decidedly. "It was
during the retreat that we went through it most. That was where you
learnt to know a man."
They were all the same. The retreat, that was the strategic operation
they were proudest of, the one action they boasted immoderately of
having shared in; it was the starting-point and foundation of all their
yarns: the retreat, the terrible forced march from Charleroi to
Montmirail, without halts, without food, without objective; the
regiments all mixed up together, zouaves and infantry, chasseurs and
engineers; wounded men, bewildered and staggering, pallid stragglers
that the gendarmes bowled over; the kits and equipments flung into the

ditches; one-day battles, always desperate, sometimes victorious; Guise,
where the German drew back; sleep deep as a stone snatched on the
bank or on the road, in spite of the waggons that thundered by, crushing
the sleepers' feet; grocer's shops looted, the poultry-yards they emptied,
the machine gunners without mules, dragoons without horses, blacks
without chiefs; the mildewed bread that men snatched from one another;
the roads blocked with covered carts and bullock-waggons, with
women and children all in tears; the native troops dragging goats after
them, the villages shooting up in flames, the bridges that were blown
up, the comrades that must needs be abandoned all bloody and
foundered; and all the time, harassing the tragic column, the Boche
cannon that barked without stopping. The retreat.... In their mouths it
took on all the air and semblance of victory.
"I take my oath that when you read on the milestones, 'Paris, 60
kilomtres,' it gave you a funny feeling."
"Especially the lads of Panama," said long Vairon.
"And then after that," wound up Sulphart carelessly, like the
commonplace epilogue of a thrilling story, "after that came the Marne."
"Do you remember the little melons at Tilloy?... Nice lot we managed
to stuff in!"
"Aye, and the buckets of wine when we came into Gueux."
"I won't forget, for my part, the sausages at Montmirail.... You couldn't
move but the big shells were on your tracks.... Ah! the swine!"
Demachy had resumed his grave look, and was eyeing these men with
envy.
"I should have liked well to be there," said he, "to be in a victory."
"Sure it was a victory," conceded Sulphart, who was turning his wreath
round and round in his fingers like a cap. "If you had been there you'd
have been bowled over like the others, and nothing more. Ask the lads

what they got at Escardes.... Only you people shouldn't talk without
knowing.... All the blighters that wrote their muck about it in the papers,
they'd have done better to keep their mouths shut. I was there
myself--yes, and I know how it all happened. Well, we went more than
fifteen days without touching our pay, from the end of August. Then
after the last hot time, they paid us the lot in one go: they bunged
fifteen sous at every man jack of us. That's the mere truth. And so if
you see any blighters that talk to you about the Marne, you've only got
to tell them one thing: that the Marne was a show that brought in fifteen
sous to the lads that pulled it off...."
. . .
Night falls speedily in November. With darkness came the cold, and
over there in the trenches rifle-fire had waked up at the hour of the
owl's awakening. We had eaten our meal in the stable, crouched and
squatting on the straw, some perched up on the mangers with their legs
dangling.
The old hands