I come from Australia."
I watched him go slouching down the rue des Trois Cailloux, head above
all the passers-by. He would be at Pozieres again next day.
VII
I was billeted for a time with other war correspondents in an old
house in the rue Amiral Courbet, on the way to the river Somme from
the Street of the Three Pebbles, and with a view of the spire of the
cathedral, a wonderful thing of delicate lines and tracery, graven
with love in every line, by Muirhead Bone, and from my dormer window.
It was the house of Mme. de la Rochefoucauld, who lived farther out of
the town, but drove in now and then to look at this little mansion of
hers at the end of a courtyard behind wrought-iron gates. It was built
in the days before the Revolution, when it was dangerous to be a fine
lady with the name of Rochefoucauld. The furniture was rather scanty,
and was of the Louis Quinze and Empire periods. Some portraits of old
gentlemen and ladies of France, with one young fellow in a scarlet
coat, who might have been in the King's Company of the Guard about the
time when Wolfe scaled the Heights of Abraham, summoned up the ghosts
of the house, and I liked to think of them in these rooms and going in
their sedan-chairs across the little courtyard to high mass at the
cathedral or to a game of bezique in some other mansion, still
standing in the quiet streets of Amiens, unless in a day in March of
1918 they were destroyed with many hundreds of houses by bombs and
gun-fire.
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