"It is good," he pronounced, and patted the soldiers on the back, as we hurried on.
He now took us to his own quarters, in a dense grove of pines. His house was of pine boughs, half above and half underground, with a bomb-proof cavern at the rear. Its furniture was a deal table and a bed of straw. We sat around on camp stools and an orderly brought in tea.
D'Artagnan then changed the subject for a few minutes from war. He had visited nearly all the world, including America. He turned to me, and to my surprise spoke in English. It was a very peculiar English, but it was not funny coming from the lips of d'Artagnan. He told me about his trip to America—how he did not have much money at the time, so he went as a lecturer to the French Societies in the big cities of the United States. It was hard to picture this big, weather-beaten soldier in such a rôle, until he told me the subject of his lecture. It was "The Soul of France"—always the Soul of France, a soul chivalrous, grand and unconquerable, that would forever make the world remember and expect.
In Boston he had tried to speak in English, at the Boston City Club. He pronounced the letter "i" in city, as in the word "site." He told me the lecture in English was very funny. Perhaps it was; but the Boston City Club had not seen their lecturer in the forest of Lorraine. They did not know that he was d'Artagnan.
After tea he showed us the park made by his soldiers in front of his "villa," as the semi-underground hut was called. A sign painted on a tree announced the "Parc des Braves." Little well-groomed paths wound among the pine needles; rustic seats were built about the trees. A dozen little beds of mountain flowers made gay stars and crescents that would not have disgraced the Tuileries. The "Parc des Braves" had even an aviary, made of wire netting (left over from the barricades) built about a tree. D'Artagnan proudly pointed out a great owl and a cowering cuckoo in different compartments of this unique cage.
But the chef d'œuvre of the Parc was the reconstructed tableau of one of the brigade's heroic episodes. A tiny rustic bridge spanned a miniature brook; beside the brook was built a mill and beyond was an old farm-house and orchard. Seven tiny French chasseurs, of wood and painted blue, were holding the bridge against a horde of wooden Germans painted gray.
On a great tree shading this story of a glorious hour in the history of his "little braves," d'Artagnan had fixed a wooden slab, telling its details in verse.
"Il y avait sept petits chasseurs
Qui ne connaissaient pas la peur."
(There were seven little chasseurs
Who knew no fear.)
That is the way the story began; and each verse began and ended with the same words. I wish I could have copied it all; but d'Artagnan, the author, was impatient to move on.