"Your regiment?"
"I haven't one."
"And the horse?"
A shrug, what indeed of the horse?
Three days later he was wearing his cassock again.
Once, when escaping from Sermaize he was nearly shot by some French soldiers. There were only a few of them, and their nerves had been shattered. Nerves do give way sometimes when an avalanche sweeps over them, and the Germans came into France like a thousand avalanches. And so these poor wretches, separated from their regiment, fled. It was probably the wisest thing they could do under the circumstances. "Sauve qui peut." There are few cries more terrible than that. But a village lay in the line of flight, and in the village there was good red wine. It was a hot day, France was lost, Paris capitulating, and man a thirsty animal. A corporal rescued M. le Curé when his back was against the wall and rifles, describing wild circles, were threatening him; finally, the nerveless ones went back to their regiment and fought gloriously for France, and Paris did not capitulate after all.
III
With a howl of bitter anguish Tante Joséphine collapsed upon the ground, and the earth shook. For Tante Joséphine was fat, and her bones were buried beyond all hope of recovery under great pendulous masses of quivering, perspiring flesh. And she had walked, mais, pensez donc!—walked thousands of accursed miles through the woods, she had tripped over roots, she had been hoisted over banks, she had crashed like an avalanche down trenches and drains. She was no longer a woman, she was a bath—behold the perspiration!—she was an ache, mon Dieu! not one, but five million villainous aches; she was a lurid fire of profanity. For while she, Tante Joséphine, walked and fell and "larded the green earth," Grandmère lay in the brouette and refused to be evicted. At first Tante Joséphine tried to get in too. Surely the war which had worked so many miracles would transform her into a telescope, but the war was unkind, and Pierre, pauvre petit gosse! had been temporarily submerged in a sea of agitated fat from which he had been rescued with difficulty. And Grandmère was only eighty-two, whereas she, Tante Joséphine, was sixty.
All day long her eyes had turned to the brouette, and to Grandmère lying back like a queen. No, she could bear it no longer. If she did not ride she would die, or be taken by the Germans, and her blood would be on Grandmère's head, and shadowed by remorse would be all that selfish woman's days. The wood resounded with the bellowings, and the green earth trembled because Tante Joséphine, as she sat on it, trembled with wrath and fatigue and desolation and woe.
Grandmère stirred in the brouette. At eighty-two one is not so active as one was at twenty, but one isn't old, ma foi! Père Bronchot was old. He would be ninety-four at Toussaint, but she—oh, she could still show that big soft thing of a Tante Joséphine what it was to be a woman of France. She was always a weakling, was Joséphine, fit only for pasturage. And so behold the quivering mountain ludicrously piling itself upon the brouette, Pierre, a pensive look in his eye, standing by the while. He staggered as he caught up the handles. The chariot swayed ominously. The mountain became a volcano spurting forth fire. The chariot steadied, and then very slowly resumed its way. Half a kilomètre, three-quarters, a whole. Grandmère was strangely silent, for at eighty-two one is not so young as one was at twenty, and kilomètres grow strangely long as the years go by.