“It does not go,” said the French sergeant. “'Cre nom de Dieu!—my men are not gay to-day. They have been wet for three weeks and their bones are aching. This place is not a Bal Tabourin. If we light even a little fire we ask for trouble. At the sight of smoke the dirty Boche starts shelling again. So we do not get dry, and we have no warmth, and we cannot make even a cup of good hot coffee. That dirty Boche up there on Vimy looks out of his deep tunnels and laughs up his sleeve and says those poor devils of Frenchmen are not gay to-day! That is true, mon Capitaine. Mais, que voulez-vous? C'est pour la France.”
“Oui. C'est pour la France.”
The French captain turned away and I could see that he pitied those comrades of his as we went over cratered earth to the village of Neuville St.-Vaast.
“Poor fellows,” he said, presently. “Not even a cup of hot coffee!... That is war! Blood and misery. Glory, yes—afterward! But at what a price!”
So we came to Neuville St.-Vaast, a large village once with a fine church, old in history, a schoolhouse, a town hall, many little streets of comfortable houses under the shelter of the friendly old hill of Vimy, and within easy walk of Arras; then a frightful rubbish heap mingled with unexploded shells, the twisted iron of babies' perambulators, bits of dead bodies, and shattered farm-carts.
Two French soldiers carried a stretcher on which a heavy burden lay under a blood-soaked blanket.
“It is a bad wound?” asked the captain.
The men laid the stretcher down, breathing hard, and uncovered a face, waxen, the color of death. It was the face of a handsome man with a pointed beard, breathing snuffily through his nose.
“He may live as far as the dressing station,” said one of the Frenchmen. “It was a trench-mortar which blew a hole in his body just now, over there.”
The man jerked his head toward a barricade of sand—bags at the end of a street of ruin.