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And so she stayed, selling the three staples of the French front, Camembert cheese, Norwegian sardines, and cakes of chocolate. But Montauville was far from safe. It was there that I first saw a man killed. I had been talking to a sentry, a small young fellow of twenty-one or two, with yellow hair and gray-blue eyes full of weariness.
"'The Good Old Summer Time' you know that? 'Harrigan' you know that?" he said in English. The rag-time of "Harrigan" floated out on the street of Montauville. But I did not care to play things which could have no violin obligato, so I began to play what I remembered of waltzes dear to every Frenchman's heart the tunes of the "Merry Widow." "Sylvia" went off with quite a dash.
A quarter of a mile beyond the corner, on the slope of Puvenelle opposite The Wood, stood Montauville, the last habitable village of the region. To the south of it rose the wooded slopes of Puvenelle; to the north, seen across a marshy meadow, were the slope and the ridge of the Bois-le-Prêtre. The dirty, mud-spattered village was caught between the leathery sweeps of two wooded ridges.
Sometimes while stationed at Montauville, I whiled away the waits between calls to the trenches in playing this instrument. It was about nine o'clock in the morning, and thus far not a single call had come in.
In three quarters of an hour, I was back again at the same moorland poste, to which an order of our commander had attached me. Montauville was full of wounded. I had three on stretchers inside, one beside me on the seat, and two others on the front mudguards. And The Wood continued to sing. From Montauville I could hear the savage yells and cries which accompanied the fighting.
"Go at once to Poste C!" The winding road lay straight ahead, and just at the end of the village street, the Germans had established a tir de barrage. This meant that a shell was falling at that particular point about once every fifty seconds. I heard two rafales break there as I was grinding up the machine. Up the slope of the Montauville hill came several of the other drivers.
Tyler, of New York, a comrade who united remarkable bravery to the kindest of hearts, followed close behind me, also evidently bound for Poste C. German bullets, fired wildly from the ridge of The Wood over the French trenches, sang across the Montauville valley, lodging in the trees of Puvenelle behind us with a vicious tspt; shells broke here and there on the stretch leading to the Quart-en-Réserve, throwing the small rocks of the road surfacing wildly in every direction.
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