This menace caused great laughter from De Montauban, and his wife, and Kenneth rewarded the audacity of De Vaux, in the presence of his wife—who seemed in no way perturbed—by filling up the glasses of his guests with another bottle of Veuve Clicquot, and drinking to the exploits of D’Artagnan—“Twenty Years After.”
Mme. de Montauban ventured to accuse Shakespeare of tremendous plagiarism from Boccaccio and the Italian novelli, and there were vivacious passages of arms between her and Kenneth, in the course of which they quoted Italian poets at each other, so leaving Bertram for a while outside the conversation, as he was ignorant of that language.
Armand de Vaux had a tête-à-tête with him.
“You fought in France, I have no doubt, sir?”
“The Somme, Flanders, Cambrai,” said Bertram.
“And still with both legs and both arms! That is wonderful. . . . You see I lost two limbs in the Great War. I do not regret them. What beautiful memories of comradeship and laughter, and immense valour! The best years of our lives!”
He spoke with absolute sincerity, and with a new light in his eyes, as though seeing with enthusiasm the vision of his fighting days.
“The comradeship was good,” said Bertram, “but the price was too great for that. Why not comradeship without war?”
“Pas possible! It needs war and the chance of death to bring out the great qualities of men. Laughter is best when it is in the midst of danger as a shield against fear. Mon Dieu! how I laughed in those days!”
He told some anecdotes of war. How the “popote” or mess had been destroyed by a German shell when they were ravenous with hunger after a long march to Ablain St. Nazaire; how they had killed a German sergeant-major and two men, luring them into No-Man’s Land by driving a lean pig through the barbed wire at dawn; how they had made a camouflage tree on the Arras-Lens road and sniped Germans like rabbits before they spotted it.