A cigarette that I had just taken from its case, fell from my nerveless fingers into the water and swirled out with the tide.
A soldier—a soldier in my retreat. How unspeakably annoying. And in that bathing suit I never would have suspected him at all.
The old fisherman explained, while I lugubriously leaned over the jetty and watched that crab puddling about his rock. There were eleven more of them—soldiers, I mean—they all lived in the little cottage near the jetty. They were there to guard the cable between the mainland and the Ile de Bréhat, two miles away. They guarded it the twenty-four hours of the day—those twelve. Every two hours one of them mounted guard where the cable comes up from the sea and solemnly guarded it from German attack.
The old fisherman pointed behind me. I turned and there, even as he had explained, I saw a man in the blue coat and red pants of the French territorial army. From the trenches the red pants have gone into the historic past. Nowadays the red pants are only for the territorials.
This particular cable sentry was also from the Midi, my fisherman explained. He too disliked the sea. He sat there and stared moodily into the sun that was just in the act of gloriously descending into the water. A last ray caught the steel bayonet of the Lebel rifle lying across his knees.
I left the jetty and walked up the winding road to the village. I went to the single store to buy tobacco and to hear the talk of the people. There were no newspapers, I thought, so their talk could not be about the war. Also there I would avoid the sight of the soldiers, because the store had liquor on its list of commodities. It is forbidden to soldiers to enter such places except at certain hours.
A fresh-faced Breton girl served out the tobacco. Cigars at two cents each were the most expensive tobacco purchase in the shop. I purchased a dozen and immediately became a celebrity and a millionaire. We talked. I asked her about the countryside, about the people and about the wonderful lace coiffures of the peasant women. She told me how the women of one hamlet wear an entirely different "coif" from those even of the neighboring farms and that throughout Brittany there are hundreds of different styles.
Then I asked her about the men folks, the few who work in the fields and the great majority who go off in the boats to Iceland in the spring and come back ten months later—those who ever do come back at all. Then quite naturally we talked about the war. For she explained that to her people the war was not so terrible as the times of peace. Then it was impossible to get letters from a fishing schooner off the Iceland banks—now it was quite easy to get letters from the trenches every few days. The men suffered far greater losses from the perils of the northern ocean than since they were all mobilized to fight the Germans. Some were killed—that was natural enough—but not half so many as the number who just sailed out and disappeared.
I was beginning to feel that perhaps the war was a benefit to this part of the world.