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Updated: June 1, 2025
That is the scene of to-morrow's constitutional." Bobby and Angus obediently scanned the village through their glasses. Probably they did not learn much. One bombarded French village is very like another bombarded French village. A cowering assemblage of battered little houses; a pitiful little main street, with its eviscerated shops and estaminets; a shattered church-spire. Beyond that, an enclosure of splintered stumps that was once an orchard. Below all, cellars, reinforced with props and sandbags, and filled with machine-guns. Voil
The children Sarah and Rachel, usually carrying a smaller child in their arms or wheeling it with them in a wooden cart, were sent into the streets to earn money by singing at the doors of cafes and estaminets.
The men soon learnt that the estaminets were the equivalent in France of the public houses at home, and thither they repaired in the evening to spend their time. Many good young men who had never taken a drop of the more invigorating liquors learnt that soldiers drank them, and the cause of teetotalism began to wane. On the 24th a move was made to Les Facons, a straggling village outside Bethune.
At this point the Battalion turned in a south-westerly direction, passing through a village in which the French and English Headquarters were quartered in "estaminets" on either side of the road. No doubt both were prosecuting their work equally successfully, but the Subaltern could not help remarking the quietness of the one, and the excitement, volubility, and apparent confusion of the other.
It burst into the narrow streets from estaminets where the soldiers danced, from halls, from drawing-rooms of confiscated German houses where officers of the "Grand Quartier General" danced a triumph. Or it might be supposed to be a triumph by the Germans who stayed in their homes after dark.
There is the English Raff Snob, that frequents ESTAMINETS and CABARETS; who is heard yelling, 'We won't go home till morning! and startling the midnight echoes of quiet Continental towns with shrieks of English slang. The boozy unshorn wretch is seen hovering round quays as packets arrive, and tippling drains in inn bars where he gets credit.
Without pay the men, of course, were cut off from even the sour and watery delights of the beer sold in the local estaminets, which abound in the villages where the troops are billeted in reserve some miles behind the firing line. As Sergeant Clancy feelingly remarked: "They stopped the pay, and that stops the beer; and then they stopped the rum.
Our boys are unaccustomed to the simple and moderate drinking of the French peasants, and they are plunged into these estaminets with their pockets full of money. Others under the influence of drink have torn up the money or tossed it recklessly away.
It was due to the presence of mind of the Camp Commandant that there were not more; for, once he realized the hopeless task of getting the fire under control, he gave orders to the men to clear as fast as they could. They needed no second bidding and made for the nearest Estaminets with speed! "Dead?" asked someone, eyeing the four motionless figures inside one of the ambulances.
There can be no fair distinction they all, taken as a unit, are in a class separated by a wide gulf from those back in supporting or reserve or artillery positions, who, in turn, are separated from the transport and ambulance drivers, who, while occasionally under shell fire, are in the zone of comparative safety, where "people" still live and farm and run stores and estaminets.
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