beautiful silver-gray hair, blue eyes, and pink cheeks; his uniform was
exceptionally clean, and he appeared to be some decent burgher torn from
his customary life. I fell into conversation with him. He recollected
that his father, a veteran of 1870, had prophesied the present war.

"'We shall see them again, the spiked helmets (les casques à pointe),'
said my father--'we shall see them again.'

"'Why?' I asked him.

"'Because they have eaten of us, and will be hungry once more.'"

The principal street of the town led from this bridge to a great square,
and continued straight on toward Maidières and Montauville. The
sidewalks around this square were in arcades under the houses, for the
second story of every building projected for seven or eight feet over
the first and rested on a line of arches at the edge of the street. To
avoid damage from shells bursting in the open space, every one of these
arcades, and there were perhaps a hundred all told, had been plugged
with sandbags, so that the square had an odd, blind look. A little life
flickered in the damp, dark alleys behind these obstructions. There was
a tobacco shop, kept by two pretty young women whom the younger soldiers
were always jollying, a wineshop, a tailorshop, and a bookstore, always
well supplied with the great Parisian weeklies, which one found later in
odd corners of shelters in the trenches. Occasionally a soldier bought a
serious book when it was to be found in the dusty files of the
"Collection Nelson"; I remember seeing a young lieutenant of artillery
buying Ségur's "Histoire de la Grande Armée en 1812," and another taking
Flaubert's "Un cœur simple." But the military life, roughly lived, and
shared with simple people, appears to make even the wisest boyish, and