"Oh!" said Pryor. "Seen some fighting?"
"Not much," said the man, "not too much." His eyes lit up as with fire and he sent a potato stripped clean of its jacket up to the roof but with such precision that it dropped down straight into the bucket. "First we went south and the Germans came across up north. 'Twas turn about and up like mad; perched on taxis, limbers, ambulance waggons, anything. We got into battle near Paris. The Boches came in clusters, they covered the ground like flies on the dead at Souchez. The 75's came into work there. 'Twas wonderful. Pip! pip! pip! pip! Men were cut down, wiped out in hundreds. When the gun was useless—guns had short lives and glorious lives there—a new one came into play and killed, killed, until it could stand the strain no longer."
"Much hand-to-hand fighting?" asked Pryor.
"The bayonet! Yes!" The potato-peeler thrust his knife through a potato and slit it in two. "The Germans said 'Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!' when we went for them like this." He made several vicious prods at an imaginary enemy. "And we cut them down."
He paused as if at a loss for words, and sent his knife whirling into the air where it spun at an alarming rate. I edged my chair nearer the door, but the potato-peeler, suddenly standing upright, caught the weapon by the haft as it circled and bent to lift a fresh potato.
"What is that for?" asked Pryor, pointing to a sword wreathed in a garland of flowers, tattooed on the man's arm.
"The rapier," said the potato-peeler. "I'm a fencer, a master-fencer; fenced in Paris and several places."
The woman of the house, the man's wife, had been buzzing round like a bee, droning out in an incoherent voice as she served the customers. Now she came up to the master-fencer, looked at him in the face for a second, and then looked at the bucket. The sweat oozed from her face like water from a sponge.
"Hurry, and get the work done," she said to her husband, then she turned to us. "You're keeping him from work," she stuttered, "you two, chattering like parrots. Allez-vous en! Allez-vous en!"
We left the house of the potato-peeler and returned to our digging. The women of France are indeed wonderful.