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Then the fresh faces and smart uniforms disappeared, and now the nearest approach to "militarism" which Paris offers to the casual sight-seer is the occasional drilling of a handful of piou-pious on the muddy reaches of the Place des Invalides. But there is another army in Paris.
More came out of the doors as we alighted. They were all in the late twenties or early thirties, men of a reserve regiment. Some had been clerks, some labourers, some farmers, some employers, when the war began. Then they were piou-pious, in French slang; then all France prayed godspeed to its beloved piou- pious.
Cable-drill is simply nothing compared to the real laying of cable. We did it twice once in rain and once in snow. The rainy day I paid out, I was never more miserable in my life than I was after two miles. Only hot coffee and singing good songs past cheery Piou-pious brought me home.
But this restraint, this business-like entrenching reminded them only too forcibly of encounters with other men of the Franks the white-clad Spanish infantry from Rio de Oro, the dreaded piou-pious, zouaves, and Légion Etrangère of the French. Firing ceased, from the Beni Harb. Silence settled on both sides.
A bugle sounded and a drum beat from the great fosse under the wall, and a company of piou-pious, red-capped, red-trousered, shambled through their evolutions in a manner to break the heart of a British or a German drill-sergeant. Then out past level fields to little Vanves, with its steep streets and its old gray church, and past the splendid grounds of the Lycée beyond.
Bah! there were better men than he; why had she not let him lie and die as he might, under the pile of dead? Bah! she could have killed herself for her folly! She, who had scores of lovers, from princes, to piou-pious, and never had a heartache for one of them, to go and care for a silent "ci-devant," who had never even noticed that her eyes had any brightness or her face had any charm!
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