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Before we reached the village where our car waited, the ambulance passed us on the way back to the estaminet. Very soon after the shell-burst, a telephone bell had rung down the line from the extreme front calling for an ambulance and stating the number of men hit, so that everybody would know what to prepare for.
Into a small estaminet at the end of the rue des Trois Cailloux, beyond the Hotel de Ville, came one day during the battles of the Somme two poilus, grizzled, heavy men, deeply bronzed, with white dust in their wrinkles, and the earth of the battlefields ingrained in the skin of their big, coarse hands. They ordered two "little glasses" and drank them at one gulp. Then two more.
If smoking was a solitary habit, it would be less likely to lead to drinking; but the same companionship, and habits of treating prevail, as in the saloon, and the step from the estaminet to the bar-room under invitation, is an easy one, where the diseased thirst, so often induced by tobacco, favors the movement to treat.
In America or Australia there are no hospitals where lie thousands of girls too young to become mothers who have been raped. We have not hundreds of boys who will never become men. A young girl said to me: "There is a baby coming; it is a boche; when it is born I will cut its throat!" A woman showed me on an estaminet floor the blood-stains of her own baby butchered before her eyes.
We were now sent away from the battle area for a rest and on the 8th October arrived at Lignereuil, where we remained for ten days. Here for some unaccountable reason we had a first class chateau to ourselves. The estaminet attached sold very bad red wine at twelve francs a bottle. Only troops just out of the line would have bought it.
This preliminary catechism being completed, the prosecutor unfolded his tale. He had been drinking the health of His Majesty the King of the Belgians and confusion to his enemies in an estaminet at the crowded hour of 7 P.M. The accused had entered, and in the presence of many of his neighbours had said to him, "Vous êtes un Bosche." "Un Bosche!" repeated the witness indignantly.
He explained the matter deliberately, with a slow choice of words, as though giving evidence of high matters before a court. It appeared that he had gone into the estaminet opposite with four friends. They had ordered five glasses of porto, for which they had paid twenty centimes each, and drank them. They then ordered five more glasses of porto and paid the same price, and drank them.
The personality of the Field-Marshal, and his heartening words, had brightened many a grim face, and lightened many a heavy load. A village called Amigny was reached at about six o'clock in the evening, and here the Battalion, in its usual evening state of prostration, was billeted. The Company settled down in the chief "estaminet" of the place. The decision was a faulty one.
These things simply do not happen. One merely stumbles over the cobbles and sees the woman who keeps the estaminet round the corner washing the floor. And her lips do not part in the dawn of a smile mercifully; her eyes are not big and blue. It was all a dream! last night was all a dream.
In the Street of the Three Pebbles there was a small estaminet into which I went one morning for a cup of coffee, while I read an Amiens news-sheet made up mostly of extracts translated from the leading articles of English papers.
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