A letter clipping describes that part of France which is shrouded in the
historic pages of knights and kings; that part which has pleased me so
much when written by another, makes me think of the poorer classes who
have lived and died in the environment of their birthplaces without
ambition, that those knights and kings might carve their deeds of blood
on shields of gold.
In this great war, these poorer classes, peasants still, are the
_poilus_ who keep the trench mud from driving them mad by that pint of
the red French wine, and they sit about me now in a little old wine shop
whose many-colored bottles, oft refilled, are as numerous in shapes and
styles as the decades they have served. The walls are spotted and
stained, and the ceilings smoked, but the delicate moldings in the stone
tell of a day when this was the thriving hostelry of the village. Now
the poorly dressed, worn-out veterans of the Great War bend over the
scarred tables and confer or wrangle as to how their work, so hard
begun, will end.