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On the oblong of white satin, within the cover, was pinned a very small and very thin gold medal. But, light as it was, it had represented much abstinence from estaminets and tobacco-shops, on the part of its donors. "Listen," the Master said, holding the medal in front of the collie. "Listen, while I read you the inscription: 'To Bruce. From some of the boys he saved from the boches."
The next day she was dumfounded at hearing from Mlle Remanjon how Mme Boche had thrown the salad away, saying that she was not yet reduced to eating the leavings of other people! From that day forth Gervaise sent her nothing more. The Boches had learned to look on her little offerings as their right, and they now felt themselves to be robbed by the Coupeaus.
One old couple, in a ferblanterie shop, who had lost their eldest son and whose other son was at the front, used to try hard not to talk about the war, but sure enough they would come to it at last, each time we saw them, and in a minute the mother would be crying and a silent tear would roll down the old father's face. Then he would point to the map and say: "But look where they are, the Boches!
They scrambled from the shell hole, Remi already having explained what he proposed to do, ready and eager for action. With the child in the lead they crept up to the German trench. The Boches slept on, not a man was awake there.
It was the start of the movement that was to clean the Boches from France. Tired, weary, blood-stained, dirty, hungry and thirsty that was the condition of all the fighters. And yet they would be ready to do it all over again the next day, after a little rest and food. And food they had, though not of the best.
My pals with the other guns, forty feet to our right, did not get all of their ammunition off before the Boches were upon them, and they, too, died there; they were incinerated alive in their little pit by smoke shells that started everything ablaze as they exploded.
"All right.... Dites-donc, les Boches courent-ils comme des lapins?" he shouted. One of the men turned his head and laughed. "He says they've been running that way for four years," said Andrews. He slipped his pack off, sat down on it, and fished for a cigarette. Chrisfield took off his helmet and rubbed a muddy hand through his hair.
It may be some one else's turn to-morrow, but after all, that is what we are here for. Anyhow, we are keeping the Boches out of "Wipers," and a bit over. So we stretch our legs in the wood, and keep the flooded trench for the next emergency. Let us approach a group of four which is squatting sociably round a small and inadequate fire of twigs, upon which four mess-tins are simmering.
That sentinel on his stomach, gripping a cold rifle with numbed hands, and cursing silently the fate which had brought him to this agony, checked the fear that Avas creeping up to his heart was that a line of Boches stealing through the mist? when he thought that the women he knew, the folk in the Normandy village, the old cure, and all the spirit of France had made a hero of him and expected him to bear himself bravely, and in imagination stood beside him to share his vigil.
"Give the boche your skin for a present? I'll say you're generous!" "It's not only the boches; they all have a hand in it." "Who, all?" "All of them back there where I come from, in Paris, friends and relations; the people on the other side of the grave, the live ones. As for us, we are as good as dead." In the long silence that followed they could hear the scream of a shell across the sky.
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