His lieutenant shook his head, murmuring to the fourrier: "Those north-country men! There is no use saying a word to them. They won't believe that their homes and families aren't there, till they see with their own eyes ... and when they do see.... I've heard that some of the men in these first regiments that followed up the Boche retreat across the devastated regions went crazy when they found their own villages ... Nidart has just one idea in his head, poor devil!—to go straight before him, like a homing pigeon, till ..." He stopped, his face darkening.
"Oh, damn the Boches!" the fourrier finished the sentence fervently.
"You see, Nidart is a master-mason by trade, and he built their own little house. He carries around a snapshot of it, with his wife and a baby out in front."
"Oh, damn the Boches!" responded the fourrier on a deeper note.
"And like all those village workmen, they got half their living out of their garden and a field or two. And you've read what the Boches did to the gardens and fruit-trees."
"Isn't there anything else we can talk about?" said the fourrier.
Nidart passed through Paris on his way (those being before the days of strictly one-destination furloughs) and, extracting some very old bills from the lining of his shoe, he spent the five hours between his trains in hasty purchasing. At the hardware shop, where he bought an ax, a hammer, some nails, and a saw, the saleswoman's vivacious curiosity got the better of his taciturnity, and she screwed from him the information that he was going back to his home in the devastated regions.
At once the group of Parisian working-people and bourgeois who happened to be in the shop closed in on him sympathetically, commenting, advising, dissuading, offering their opinions with that city-bred, glib-tongued clatter which Nidart's country soul scorned and detested.
"No, no, my friend, it's useless to try to go back. The Germans have made a desert of it. My cousin's wife has a relative who was in the regiment that first followed the Germans after their retreat from Noyon, and he said ..."
"The Government is going to issue a statement, saying that land will be given in other parts of France to people from those regions, because it's of no use to try to rebuild from under the ruins."