Without replying, we found ourselves all at once lying in the silver-weed. We tore it up abstractedly, like men who are obliged to work their muscles in order to think more freely.
A little grape-vine was growing at our feet and reached, with two graceful efforts, a ridge of earth gleaming with the freshness of wet grass. It was a neat, pure little vine of Champagne, bursting with juice, cared for like a divine and sacred thing. No wild plants; nothing but the stubbly vine-stock and the soil—that rich soil which the rains wash away and which, each season, the peasants carry up again, on their backs, right to the summit of the hills.
From amid this blend of green herbage we saw suddenly emerging an old thin woman, with a rusty complexion and hair white and disordered. In one hand she held a pail full of ashes, and with the other scattered handfuls of it on the feet of the vines.
On seeing us, she stopped, and adjusted with a dusty finger a coil of hair blown about by the wind. She stared at us. Then she spoke:
“What’s your regiment, you others?”
“The 110th line, Madame.”
“Mine did not belong to that regiment.”
“You have boys in the army?”
“Ah! I had once.”
There was silence, broken by the cry of animals, the gusts of the high wind, and the hissing murmur of the shaken foliage. The old woman scattered a few handfuls of the ashes, and then came near and began in a stumbling voice that often lost itself in the wind: