I
Depuis onze mois que nous sommes partis en guerre,
A tous les militaires,
On a décidé de plaire.
Aussi depuis ce temps là, à l'intendance c'est dit,
De nous mettr' tous en khaki.
Maint'nant voilà l'beau temps qui vient d' paraître
Aussi répètons tous le cœur en fête.
Refrain
Regardez nos p'tits soldats,
Ils ont l'air d'être un peu là,
Habilles
D'la tête jusqu'aux pieds
En khaki, en khaki,
Ils sont contents de servir,
Mais non pas de mourir,
Et cela c'est parce qu' on leur a mis,
En quelque sorte, la t'nue khaki.
II
Maintenant sur toutes les grand's routes vous pouvez voir
Parcourant les trottoirs
Du matin jusqu'au soir
Les défenseurs Belges, portant tous la même tenue
Depuis que l'ancienne a disparue,
Aussi quand on voit I'9e défiler
C' n'est plus régiment des panachés.
Même Refrain.
III
Nous sommes tous heureux d'avoir le costume des Anglais
Seul'ment ce qu'il fallait,
Pour que ça soit complet.
Et je suis certain si l'armée veut nous mettre à l'aise
C'est d'nous donner la solde Anglaise.
Le jour qu'nous aurions ça, ah! quell' affaire
Nous n' serions plus jamais dans la misère.
Refrain
Vous les verriez nos p'tits soldats,
J'vous assure qu'ils seraient un peu là,
Habilles,
D'la tête jusqu'aux pieds,
En khaki, en khaki,
Ils seraient fiers de repartir,
Pour le front avec plaisir,
Si les quatre poches étaient bien games
De billets bleus couleur khaki.

FLIES: A FANTASY

Outside the window stretched the village street, flat, with bits of dust and dung rising on the breaths of wind and volleying into rooms upon the tablecloth and into pages of books. It was a street of small yellow brick houses, a shapeless church, a convent school—freckled buildings, dingy. Up and down the length of it, it was without one touch of beauty. It gave back dust in the eyes. It sounded with thunder of transports, rattle of wagons, soft whirr of officers' speed cars, yelp of motor horns, and the tap-tap of wooden shoes on tiny peasants, boys and girls. A little sick black dog slunk down the pavement, smelling and staring. A cart bumped over the cobbles, the horse with a great tumor in its stomach, the stomach as if blown out on the left side, and the tumor with a rag upon it where it touched the harness.

Inside the window, a square room with a litter of six-penny novels in a corner, fifty or sixty books flung haphazard, some of them open with the leaves crushed back by the books above. In another corner, a heap of commissariat stuff, tins of bully beef, rabbit, sardines, herring, and glasses of jam, and marmalade. On the center table, a large jug of marmalade, ants busy in the yellow trickle at the rim. Filth had worked its way into the red table-cover. Filth was on every object in the room, like a soft mist, blurring the color and outlines of things. In the corners, under books and tins, insects moved, long, thin, crawling. A hot noon sun came dimly through the dirty glass of the closed window, and slowly baked a sleeping man in the large plush armchair. Around the chair, as if it were a promontory in a heaving sea, were billows of stale crumpled newspapers, some wadded into a ball, others torn across the page, all flung aside in ennui.

The face of the man was weary and weak. It showed all of his forty-one years, and revealed, too, a great emptiness. Flies kept rising and settling again on the hands, the face, and the head of the man—moist flies whose feet felt damp on the skin. They were slow and languid flies which wanted to settle and stay. It was his breathing that made them restless, but not enough to clear them away, only enough to make a low buzzing in the sultry room. Across the top of his head a bald streak ran from the forehead, and it was here they returned to alight, after each twitching and heave of the sunken body.

In the early months he had fought a losing fight with them. The walls and ceiling and panes of glass were spotted with the marks of his long battle. But his foes had advanced in ever-fresh force, clouds and swarms of them beyond number. He had gone to meet them with a wire-killer, and tightly rolled newspapers. He had imported fly paper from Dunkirk. But they could afford to sacrifice the few hundreds, which his strokes could reach, and still overwhelm him. Lately, he had given up the struggle, and let them take possession of the room. They harassed him when he read, so he gave up reading. They got into the food, so he ate less. Between his two trips to the front daily at 8 A.M. and 2 P.M., he slept. He found he could lose himself in sleep. Into that kingdom of sleep, they could not enter. As the weeks rolled on, he was able to let himself down more and more easily into silence. That became his life. A slothfulness, a languor, even when awake, a half-conscious forcing of himself through the routine work, a looking forward to the droning room, and then the settling deep into the old plush chair, and the blessed unconsciousness.

He drove a Red Cross ambulance to the French lines at Nieuport, collected the sick and wounded soldiers and brought them to the Poste de Secours, two miles back of the trenches. He lived a hundred feet from the Poste, always within call. But the emergency call rarely came. There were only the set runs, for the war had settled to its own regularity. A wonderful idleness hung over the lines, where millions of men were unemployed, waiting with strange patience for some unseen event. Only the year before, these men were chatting in cafés, and busy in a thousand ways. Now, the long hours of the day were lived without activity in thoughtless routine. Under the routine there was always the sense of waiting for a sudden crash and horror.

The man was an English gentleman. It was his own car he had brought, paid for by him, and he had offered his car and services to the Fusiliers Marins. They had been glad of his help, and for twelve months he had performed his daily duty and returned to his loneliness. The men under whom he worked were the French doctors of the Poste—the chief doctor, Monsieur Claude-Marie Le Bot, with four stripes on his arm, and the courteous, grave administrator, Eustache-Emmanuel Couillandre, a three-stripes man, and a half dozen others, of three stripes and two. They had welcomed him to their group when he came to them from London. They had found him lively and likable, bringing gossip of the West End with a dash of Leicester Square. Then slowly a change had come on him. He went moody and silent.

"What's the matter with you?" asked Doctor Le Bot one day.