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Generally the British troops were popular in Picardy and Artois, and when they left women kissed and cried, in spite of laughter, and joked in a queer jargon of English-French. In the estaminets of France and Flanders they danced with frowzy peasant girls to the tune of a penny-in-the-slot piano, or, failing the girls, danced with one another.
We took advantage of him, for once having persuaded him to give us a lift, we froze onto him and made him cart us about the country all day. We kept him kind and generous, I regret to say, by buying him wine at far too many estaminets. Towards evening the thunder of the guns had swelled into an ominous roar. We passed through villages disfigured by shell-fire.
The game of "House" is very popular also. It takes two men to run it. This game consists of numerous squares of cardboard containing three rows of numbers, five numbers to a row. The numbers run from one to ninety. Each card has a different combination. The French estaminets in the villages are open from eleven in the morning until one in the afternoon in accordance with army orders.
Although it was very late a number of troops were still singing uproariously in the various estaminets which I passed. On turning a corner I saw the village bridge and on it a sentry box. While I stood in the dark shadow of a house a small party of Germans, carrying saddlery, overtook me.
There was a canteen which is really an officially managed shop for good, cheap groceries in an outhouse at the end of the village; there were three or four estaminets and cafés, with cheerful and passably pretty mademoiselles, and good coffee, and very vile wine, labelled temporarily as champagne. There was also for some who obtained leave a visit to a neighbouring town.
"It was one of the big ones, and it came right through the wire on top of him." The gruff voice was soft. "Poor bairn!" Il n'y en a plus. There is no more. French phrase signifying complete absence of. Largely heard in estaminets near closing time. Naploo. Original pure English phrase signifying the perisher has run out of beer. Napoo.
Down the long, straight, dusty road we marched, hop yards and bright coloured fields on either side, here and there passing prosperous looking farms and estaminets: what a pleasant change it was from that ruined, dismal jungle we had so recently left! About three or four miles out we came to a village; the main road ran right through it, forming its principal street.
Our way to the "wood" was along the dreariest of dusty high-roads, bordered with mean houses and disreputable-looking estaminets; and the Bois de Boulogne itself, then undivided from Paris by the fortifications which subsequently encircled the city, was a dismal network of sandy avenues and carrefours, traversed in every direction by straight, narrow, gloomy paths, a dreary wilderness of low thickets and tangled copsewood.
It met with but an indifferent success and soon closed its doors despite its supposedly all-compelling attractions. In the mid-nineteenth century a revolution came over the cafés of Paris. Tobacco had invaded their precincts; previously one smoked only in the estaminets.
After that, when the Americans hi the camps around, hungry upon the French ration, or drunk upon the mixture of methylated spirits and whisky sold in subterranean estaminets of ruined villages, picked a quarrel, there were deaths instead of broken heads and black eyes. "They must ... they MUST go home!" said the French, turning their easy wrath upon the homesick Americans.
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