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Updated: June 1, 2025
A muddy, unkempt battalion would arrive in search of rest and recuperation. It distributed itself among houses, cottages, and barns, while the Frenchwomen looked sweet or sour according to their diverse tempers, and whether they kept estaminets, sold farm produce, had husbands l
Out of a wild confusion of impressions, the tumult of these scenes, the inevitable contradictions and inconsistencies and imaginings of men and women drunk with the excitement of this time, I sorted out some clear threads of fact and with the aid of the Strategist, who spread out his maps on wayside banks, blotting out the wild flowers, or on the marble-topped tables outside fly-blown estaminets in village streets, tracked out the line of the German advance and saw the peril of the French.
The solemn and impressive chanting of the priests kindled the pious enthusiasm of the multitude, and as the line passed the cafés and estaminets, or smoking houses, the pipe, the drink, and the gay jest were abandoned, to pay homage to the faith of the nation.
In the wayside inns or estaminets one could extract amusement and profit listening to the peasantry or admiring the sunlight dancing upon the array of bottles and glass on the leaden counters, or watch the peasants kneel and cross themselves before the invariable quaint niched figure of the Virgin and Child under the hanging lighted lantern at a street corner, the evidence of the piety of the village, or the throngs of lace-capped, rosy-cheeked milkmaids with small green carts drawn by large, black, "slobbering" dogs of fierce mien, from the distant farms, on their way to market.
Shops all open. Estaminets and nice young things. I used to like war better than a school-boy likes Sat'd'y afternoons. It wasn't work and it wasn't play. And there was no law you couldn't break if you 'ad sense enough to come to attention smart and answer quick. Yes, sir. "I knew so little about war then that I'm sorry I never tried to be a military expert. But my education was neglected.
Even the estaminets and brasseries, which are but second-rate cafés, and the ordinary wine-shops, still lower in the scale, in which the coachman and commissionnaire regale themselves, taking a canon across the counter in the morning and playing a game of cards in the back shop at night, are by no means the hideous gulping-down places in which our land abounds.
They were courageous, those women in the firing-line. Their thoughts were always for their husbands and sons and brothers who were fighting side by side with us. Meanwhile, they kept their little shops and estaminets open for the soldiers' trade and made a brave show of living in the old way.
The first thing the stranger does in Paris, is of course to find temporary lodging, and the next is to select a good restaurant. Paris without its restaurants, cafes, estaminets, and cercles, would be shorn of half its glory. They are one of its most distinguished and peculiar features. Between the hours of five and eight, in the evening of course, all Paris is in those restaurants.
And because by now they had no slightest difficulty in making these billet inhabitants understand what they required a fire for cooking, stretching space on a floor, the location of the nearest estaminets, whether eggs, butter, and bread were obtainable, and how much was the price they had fondly imagined in their hearts, and boasted loudly in their home letters, that they were quite satisfactorily conversant with the French language.
Here we received our first pay since arriving in France; fifteen francs each. It doesn't sound like much but, believe me, we made those "sous" go a long way and bought lots of little delicacies we could not otherwise have had. While at Dranoutre we associated with the inhabitants, in the stores and estaminets.
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