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They do not, it is true, march as regularly as the bourgeois, and they have nothing but kepis and old muskets; but, as far as fighting goes, they are worth all the bourgeois put together."
Two mornings later, the door bell rang. A visitor! There came toward him a soldier a little soldier of the infantry, timid, with his kepis in his hand, stuttering excuses in Spanish: "I knew that you were here . . . I come to . . ."
The trousers of bright scarlet cloth, the red kepis which he had hailed with such joy in the expedition of the Marne, no longer existed. All the men passing along the roads were soldiers. All the vehicles, even the ox-carts, were guided by military men. Suddenly the automobile stopped before some ruined houses blackened by fire. "Here we are," announced the official.
The unexpected defense of the fugitives had upset the advance of the invasion. Desnoyers thought despairingly of that handful of mad fellows and their stubborn chief. What was their fate going to be? . . . Focussing his glasses on the village, he saw the red spots of kepis waving like poppies over the green of the meadows.
The men wore posies in their kepis. In white chalk they had scrawled legends upon the cattle-trucks in which they travelled. "A mort Guillaume!" "Vive la Gloire!" "Les Francais ne se rendent jamais!" Many of them had fought at Longwy and along the heights of the Vosges. The youngest of them had bristling beards.
These woods were misty blue in the cool autumn morning, there were bivouac fires, coffee-pots on the coals, and standing beside these fires soldiers in kepis and red trousers and heavy blue coats with the flaps pinned back. Just such soldiers and scenes you have seen in the war pictures of Detaille and De Neuville.
I did not stop to investigate; the flies bothered us so terribly, and long low mounds with red kepis piled upon them told of the graves of France's defenders. Far ahead I could discover groups of men with shovels, hastily burying those who remained. To the right a lazy column of dense smoke rose reluctantly in the heavy air.
There were posies in their kepis, and bouquets were pinned by the plump hands of peasant girls to the jackets of the soldiers of the line, gunners, cuirassiers, dragoons, and fusiliers marins. Between the chorus of the Marseillaise came snatches of songs learnt in the cabarets of Montmartre and the cafes chantants of provincial towns.
Just then there approached across the courtyard a trio of youths in white uniforms and gold-laced képis, their breasts ablaze with decorations. At sight of them the minister doubled himself in the middle like a jack-knife. They were, it appeared, some of the royal princes sons of the King.
Again marched Continentals, Chasseurs, and so on. Yet not as before; all their ranks were of new men; the too old, the too frail, the too young, they of helpless families, and the "British subjects." Natives of France made a whole separate "French Legion," in red képis, blue frocks, and trousers shaped like inverted tenpins, as though New Orleans were Paris itself.
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