It was at Noeux-les-Mines, in the Café Salome, at the bottom of the
old slag-heap by the station. After tea, there being no further parade
until the working party assembled at ten o'clock that night, I had
repaired thither to drink wine and smoke until closing time. As always,
the _café_ was crowded with the men of half-a-dozen London regiments,
with Scotsmen in stained and muddy kilts, and French artillerymen
from the South. Later in the evening they would begin to sing in
unison--great roaring choruses swung and tossed from _café_ to _café_
and taken up by the crowded-out groups in the street.
I had managed to secure a chair at a little table in the corner, and
for companion saw before me a small, grizzled man, about fifty, whose
blue eyes, despite the dark rings underneath them, were yet singularly
intelligent, keen, and clear. We exchanged a few remarks whilst
taking each other's measure, and then, apropos of my description
of a terrible bombardment by the German _minenwerfers_ which we had
recently endured, he began to talk, and gave me a rambling impression
of his strange and original career, and especially of his adventures in
connection with his masterpiece, "Big-Bang"--a device now extinct.
I will call him X----. Before his connection with the British Army I
gathered he had wandered widely in an up-and-down, rolling-stone sort
of fashion. The Klondike had known his store during the gold rush.
He was one of those men who did undefined but profitable things in
the Western States before the days of their organized exploitation;
made thousands of dollars and spent every cent of them, roving here
and there, never staying anywhere for long, as is the way with these
pioneers of the human race.