I saw a scene with a French poilu one day in the Street of the Three
Pebbles, during those battles of the Somme, when the French troops were
fighting on our right from Maricourt southward toward Roye. It was like
a scene from “Gaspard.” The poilu was a middle-aged man, and very drunk
on some foul spirit which he had bought in a low cafe down by the river.
In the High Street he was noisy, and cursed God for having allowed the
war to happen, and the French government for having sentenced him and
all poor sacre poilus to rot to death in the trenches, away from
their wives and children, without a thought for them; and nothing but
treachery in Paris:
“Nous sommes trahis!” said the man, raising his arms. “For the hundredth
time France is betrayed.”
A crowd gathered round him, listening to his drunken denunciations. No
one laughed. They stared at him with a kind of pitying wonderment. An
agent de police pushed his way between the people and caught hold of the
soldier by the wrist and tried to drag him away. The crowd murmured a
protest, and then suddenly the poilu, finding himself in the hands
of the police, on this one day out of the trenches--after five
months--flung himself on the pavement in a passion of tears and
supplication.
“Je suis pere de famille!... Je suis un soldat de France!... Dans les
tranchees pour cinq mois!... Qu'est-ce que mes camarades vont dire, 'cre
nom de Dieu? et mon capitaine? C'est emmordant apres toute ma service
comme brave soldat. Mais, quoi donc, mon vieux!”
“Viens donc, saligaud,” growled the agent de police.
The crowd was against the policeman. Their murmurs rose to violent
protest on behalf of the poilu.
“C'est un heros, tout de meme. Cinq mois dans les tranches! C'est
affreux! Mais oui, il est soul, mais pour--quoi pas! Apres cinq mois sur
le front qu'est-ce que cela signifie? Ca n'a aucune importance!”
A dandy French officer of Chasseurs Alpins stepped into the center of
the scene and tapped the policeman on the shoulder.
“Leave him alone. Don't you see he is a soldier? Sacred name of God,
don't you know that a man like this has helped to save France, while you
pigs stand at street corners watching petticoats?”
He stooped to the fallen man and helped him to stand straight.
“Be off with you, mon brave, or there will be trouble for you.”
He beckoned to two of his own Chasseurs and said:
“Look after that poor comrade yonder. 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. “He was a pig of an officer, a
dirty Boche. Very chic, too, and young like a schoolboy.”
One of the women patted him on the shoulder. Her eyes glistened.
“Did you slit his throat, the dirty dog? Eh, I'd like to get my fingers
round the neck of a dirty Boche!”
“I finished him with a grenade,” said the poilu. “It was good enough. It
knocked a hole in him as large as a cemetery. See then, my cabbage. It
will make you smile. It is a funny kind of mascot, eh?”
He put on the table a small leather pouch stained with a blotch of
reddish brown. His big, clumsy fingers could hardly undo the little
clasp.
“He wore this next his heart,” said the man. “Perhaps he thought it
would bring him luck. But I killed him all the same! 'Cre nom de Dieu!”
He undid the clasp, and his big fingers poked inside the flap of the
pouch.
“It was from his woman, his German grue. Perhaps even now she doesn't
know he's dead. She thinks of him wearing this next to his heart. 'Cre
nom de Dieu! It was I that killed him a week ago!”
He held up something in his hand, and the light through the estaminet
window gleamed on it. It was a woman's lock of hair, like fine-spun
gold.
The two women gave a shrill cry of surprise, and then screamed with
laughter. One of them tried to grab the hair, but the poilu held it
high, beyond her reach, with a gruff command of, “Hands off!” Other
soldiers and women in the estaminet gathered round staring at the yellow
tress, laughing, making ribald conjectures as to the character of the
woman from whose head it had come. They agreed that she was fat and
ugly, like all German women, and a foul slut.
“She'll never kiss that fellow again,” said one man. “Our old one has
cut the throat of that pig of a Boche!”
“I'd like to cut off all her hair and tear the clothes off her back,”
said one of the women. “The dirty drab with yellow hair! They ought to
be killed, every one of them, so that the human race should by rid of
them!”
“Her lover is a bit of clay, anyhow,” said the other woman. “A bit of
dirt, as our poilus will do for all of them.”
The soldier with the woman's hair in his hand stroked it across his
forefinger.
“All the same it is pretty. Like gold, eh? I think of the woman,
sometimes. With blue eyes, like a German girl I kissed in Paris-a
dancing-girl!”
There was a howl of laughter from the two women.
“The old one is drunk. He is amorous with the German cow!”
“I will keep it as a mascot,” said the poilu, scrunching it up and
thrusting it into his pouch. “It'll keep me in mind of that saligaud of
a German officer I killed. He was a chic fellow, tout de meme. A boy.”