Eight o'clock in the morning and nothing before us but a day of rest. We do not go down to the village, however, until four o'clock in the afternoon. Then we hastily erect temporary shelters against the weather, building them of pointed stakes, branches and bundles of straw. The rain sweeps down obliquely, driven by a westerly wind. Men lie face down in the straw through which course streams of rain. Many of them fall asleep, and when they wake after their short siesta, the straw has left on their cheeks crimson furrows which look like scars.
The plateau, covered as it now is with little huts of straw erected in less than an hour, has all the appearance of a gipsy encampment. The Captain's stick thrust in the ground before one of the larger of these shelters indicates Headquarters. He's pretty certain to be there himself, although there are no signs either of him or of his messengers. Through the rain-mist, indistinct figures occasionally drift across the deserted plain without giving it life. The rain makes them vague, colourless, almost formless. Gradually they draw away into indistinctness, finally to disappear so abruptly as to leave one puzzled and mystified. A second before they were visible; they are no longer so now; and there remains only the drenched plain on which our straw huts appear like strange unhealthy excrescences.
Between two showers, Porchon appears before me. He carries in his hand a can in which there is something smoking and steaming. He offers it to me with a plainly self-satisfied grin.
"A fine company, mine, what? Everything in stock you can possibly want. Smell that, old man, and fill your nostrils well before drinking it."
To my amazement the contents of the can prove to be cocoa, which duly disappears. I can recall nothing since leaving the depot which has tended to create such a sense of comfort within me, such a sense of well-being, security and peace. Can we indeed be at war? Can one reconcile the thought of war with steaming, boiling cocoa? My astonishment lasts longer than the fragrant liquid.
"Where did you find that?…" I asked.
Without replying he draws from his large pockets a brandy flask, a sausage and two pots of jam from Bar-le-Duc. These jams gave the show away.
"I know!" I exclaimed. "You've run across a peddling grocer from Bar?"
And while speaking, a vision I had often seen on the roads at home comes to me, and I add with a tone of deep conviction:
"He had a little wagon with oilcloth curtains, and there were bells on the horse's collar."