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He is un peu etoile."
The crowd applauded. Their sympathy was all for the drunken soldier of
France.


V

Into a small estaminet at the end of the rue des Trois Cailloux,
beyond the Hotel de Ville, came one day during the battles of the
Somme two poilus, grizzled, heavy men, deeply bronzed, with white dust
in their wrinkles, and the earth of the battlefields ingrained in the
skin of their big, coarse hands. They ordered two "little glasses" and
drank them at one gulp. Then two more.
"See what I have got, my little cabbage," said one of them, stooping
to the heavy pack which he had shifted from his shoulders to the other
seat beside him. "It is something to make you laugh."
"And what is that, my old one?" said a woman sitting on the other side
of the marble-topped table, with another woman of her own class, from
the market nearby.
The man did not answer the question, but fumbled into his pack,
laughing a little in a self-satisfied way.
"I killed a German to get it," he said.


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