Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 13, 2025
"A movie show tonight, and you can get anything you want at the estaminet, the one on the square, opposite the English tank, is the best. There are a couple of nice Frenchwomen in the Red Cross barrack, up on the hill, in the old convent garden. They try to look out for the civilian population, and we're on good terms with them.
Well I happened to drop into a estaminet here yesterday and that's kind of a store where a man can buy stuff to take along with him or you can get a cup of coffee or pretty near anything and they was a girl on the job in there and she smiled when I come in and I smiled at her back and she seen I was American so she begin talking to me in English only she has got some brogue and its hard to make it out what she is trying to get at.
"I expect they think we're rather too fond of spreading broad our phylacteries," said the Assistant Provost Marshal. "Now I'm a sort of licensing authority, Brewster Sessions in fact, for this commune, and the estaminet proprietors think I'm a Temperance fanatic," he said, as he put forth his hand for the whisky bottle.
The following night they were spotted in a French estaminet, by a bunch of sharp-eyed Tommies, and, as luck would have it, the men were chatting about the ten-pound prize for capturing these same fellows, and their mouths were watering at the picture that each one of them was painting of what he would do if he only had the prize.
We determined to push on as it was now dusk, but my engine jibbed, and we worked on it in the gloom among the dark and broken houses. The men in the trenches roused themselves to a sleepless night, and intermittent rifle-shots rang out in the damp air. We rode north to the Estaminet de l'Epinette, passing a road which forking to the right led to a German barricade.
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.
I could tell many stories of the next few days marching and billeting and getting ready for action again; of the village that no English troops had visited before, and the inhabitants that feared us, and afterwards did not want us to leave; of the friendly bearded patron of an estaminet, who flourished an 'Echo de Paris, and pointed to the words ténacité anglaise in an account of the fighting; of the return of the signalling officer, who, while attending a course at an Army School, had been roped in to lead one of Sandeman Carey's infantry platoons; of the magnificently equipped casualty clearing station that a week before the offensive had been twenty-five miles behind the lines, and only got its last patients away two hours before the Boches arrived!
It was a terrific bombardment; it was the biggest row I have heard since the Battle of Messines! After a few minutes we went and sat in C Company dug-out in the Estaminet. Captain Andrews was there too. Who should walk in but Gaulter, of Hut 5 at Gailes! He is in the 1/4th King's Own in our Brigade. I had a talk with him. We returned about 4 a.m. to Bilge Trench; and Andrews went back to Potijze.
Every house, every estaminet, every barn, every stable was filled to its capacity with folk who had fled in despair before the cloven hoof of the advancing Hun. Glance at the map on page 142 and judge of the condition of a city practically surrounded on all sides by the enemy.
They laid him in the inner room, and proceeded to put the estaminet in a state of defence ready to hold the same against all comers until such time as the relieving Division should take over, and they themselves be enabled, under the kindly cloak of darkness, to carry back their beloved officer to a more worthy resting-place.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking