The first thing to do was to go up to my neighbour's queer big kitchen—up on the roofs—because there were eleven little soldiers at supper, to whom, though I have not been here to see them until now, I must say good-bye. It is the last day of their leave, they will be off to-morrow.
Always my permissionnaires eat with my neighbour's permissionnaires together in the kitchen on the roof. They are always men from the invaded countries, who have nowhere to go for their leave.
Before, they have always been men who had been in hospitals and were sent to us for their sick-leave; but these are little young boys, the Classe Seize, just from their dépôts, with a few days of leave before their beginning of battle. The oldest of them is nineteen.
You go up to the kitchen by a little twisted stairway, like the stairway of a tower. On three sides of the kitchen there are charming blue mansarde roofs and black crooked chimney-pots, and on the fourth side there are the treetops of an old garden. When the leaves are fallen, one can look down from the kitchen terrace, through the branches of the trees, and see all the design of the garden, paths and lawns, statues and massifs and the big central basin, as in the ground plan, drawn so long ago.
To-night the fallen leaves in the sunset made the garden a place all of amber. One looked down into an amber glow. And all the roofs and treetops of the quarter, and the two tall towers of Sainte Clotilde, seemed translucent; for the gold of the sunset to shine through.
The kitchen has a floor of polished red brick tiles and shines with beautiful copper pots.
Eleven little soldiers were just finishing their coffee at the table with the red cloth.
What babies they are. And how alike they look, all of them. It is absurd. Eleven round close-cropped heads; eleven round rosy peasant faces; eleven pairs of round clear eager questioning eyes; eleven straight young figures, with stiff gestures, in bleu d'horizon.
Classe Seize, eighteen years, nineteen years, twenty years. It has become the age to die.