The soloist hoarse (he should have had a megaphone, so terrific was the din), his place was taken by a creature so picturesque that all my hearts went out to him at once. (It is as well to take a few hundred with you when you go to France, they have such a trick of mislaying themselves.) He was tall and slender, finely made, splendidly poised, well-knit, a graceful thing with finished gestures, and he wore a red fez, wide mustard-coloured trousers and a Zouave coat. He was singularly handsome with chiselled features and eyes of that deep soft brown that one associates with the South. Furthermore, he possessed no mean gift of oratory.
He stood on the bench that did duty as a platform. Jan Van Steen might have painted the canteen then, or would he have vulgarised it? In spite of everything, in some indefinable way it was not vulgar, and yet we instinctively felt that it ought to have been. What saved it? Ah, that I cannot tell. Perhaps the dim light, or the faint blueish haze of tobacco smoke, the stacked arms, trench-helmets hanging on the walls. Or else that wonderful horizon-blue, a colour that is capable of every artistic nuance, that lures the imagination, that offers a hundred beauties to the eye, and can resolve itself as exquisitely against the dark boarding of a canteen as against the first delicate green of spring, or against autumn woods a riot of colour.
Now the speech of that graceless creature, swaying lightly above the crowd, was everything that a canteen or war-time speech ought not to be. It began with abuse of capitalists—well, they deserved it, perhaps. It taxed them with all responsibility for the war, it yearned passionately to see them in the trenches. There, at least, we were in accord. We know a few.... But when it went on to say that the masses who fought were fools, that they should "down tools," that the German is too rich, too powerful, too well-organised, too supreme a militarist ever to be defeated.... Then British pride arose in arms.... Just what might have happened I cannot say, for French pride arose too, and as it rose the orator descended, and holy calm fell for a moment upon the raging tumult.
It was indeed a hectic evening, and I, for one, was hoarse for two days after it. Even "Monsieur désire?" or "Ça fait trente-trois sous, Monsieur," was an exercise requiring vocal cords of steel or of wire in such a hubbub, and mine, alas! are of neither.
But the descent of the orator was not the end. Somehow, no matter how, it came to certain ears that the canteen that night had been the scene of an "orgy," the reputation of France was at stake, and so it befell that one afternoon when the thermometer sympathetically registered twenty-two degrees of frost, Colonel X. interviewed those of us who had assisted at the revels, separately one by one, in the little office behind the canteen. He wanted, it seems, to find out exactly what had happened. Well, he found out!
Put to the question, "Colonel X.," quoth I, not knowing the enormity I was committing, "the men had drunk a little too much."
"But, Mademoiselle," his dignity was admirable, reproof was in every line of his exquisitely-fitting uniform, "soldiers of France are never drunk."
"Then"—this very sweetly—"can you tell me where they get the wine?"
And he told me! He ought to have shot me, of course, and no doubt I should richly have deserved it. But inadvertently I had touched upon one of his pet grievances. The military authorities can close the débitants and restaurants, but they cannot close the épiceries.