He helped to perfect it, so he knew. We left him gazing affectionately at it, a fine specimen of French manhood, tall and slender, but strongly made, with clear humorous eyes, and breeding in every line of him.
I often wonder whether he and his crapouillot are still killing "lots of Boches," and whether he ever exclaims as did a woman who saw them breaking over the frontier in 1914, "What a people! They are like ants: the more of them you kill, the more there are."
We would have liked to linger in the sunny flower-encrusted garden, but R. awaited us. There with consummate skill we evaded M. le Curé, and did our visiting under no guidance but our own. A quaint little village is R., deep enbosomed in swelling uplands, with woods all about it, but, like N., stricken by neglect and poverty. The inhabitants of both seemed rough and somewhat degraded, a much lower type than the majority of our refugees, but perhaps they were only poor and discouraged. The war has set so many strange seals upon us, we may no longer judge by the old standards, no longer draw conclusions with the light, careless assumption of infallibility of old.
[CHAPTER X]
PRIESTS AND PEOPLE
I
Having tasted the delights of a mild vagabondage, we now turned our thoughts to other villages, modestly supposing that by degrees we could "do" the Meuse. (Had we but known it the whole of France lay before us, refugees everywhere, and every refugee in need). Having requisitioned a motor-car we planned tours, but first we investigated Behonne on foot. It lies on the hill above the aviation ground, so let no man ask why it came first in our affections.