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Now then, take yourself off," cried the ungracious adored one. But the poilu was not to be so silenced. Putting his hand to his heart and addressing the assembly: "Ungrateful country!" he cried, "is it thus that you receive your sons who shed their blood for you?" "That's all right, but go and tell it elsewhere. Go on, I say!" "I've only got one more word to say and then it will be over."
The crowd murmured a protest, and then suddenly the poilu, finding himself in the hands of the police, on this one day out of the trenches after five months flung himself on the pavement in a passion of tears and supplication.
"Here are friends; come up the stairs and join us." In rapid succession those men dashed through the opening of the hall, leapt up the stairs three at a time, and were dragged over the parapet which the veteran poilu had had erected. Then Henri retreated slowly, and, having rejoined his friends, sat down, rifle in hand, to see what would happen.
Husson, who, after adjusting her spectacles on her thin nose, read as follows: Bread...........................four sous Milk............................two sous Butter .........................eight sous Malvina Levesque got into trouble last year with Mathurin Poilu.
"The poilu of Verdun," writes M. Joseph Reinach, "became an epic figure" and the whole battle rose before Europe as a kind of apocalyptic vision of Death and Courage, staged on a great river, in an amphitheatre of blood-stained hills. All the eyes in the world were fixed on this little corner of France.
There were many English soldiers, mostly elderly men of the so-called "Navvie's Battalions," but among all the others, was quite a number whose uniform was the subject for much speculation until some one happened to notice that they were always working in groups and were, invariably, accompanied by a poilu carrying a rifle with bayonet fixed.
He had to work for his living like any demobilized poilu who returned to his counter or his conductor's step on the tramway. And she had made such a flourish among all her acquaintance over son mari le general. She went off by herself and wept. The cook whom she had engaged, coming to lay the cloth in the tiny dining-room found her sobbing with her arms on the table.
What's the trouble?" I saw then that, like the French poilu I have described, this tall Australian was in the grasp of a French agent de police, a small man of whom he took no more notice than if a fly had settled on his wrist. The Australian was not drunk. I could see that he had just drunk enough to make his brain very clear and solemn.
Eh, I'd like to get my fingers round the neck of a dirty Boche!" "I finished him with a grenade," said the poilu. "It was good enough. It knocked a hole in him as large as a cemetery. See then, my cabbage. It will make you smile. It is a funny kind of mascot, eh?" He put on the table a small leather pouch stained with a blotch of reddish brown.
Her poilu is her beau ideal of faith and courage, of patriotism and devotion to the principles of human rights, of cheerfulness and hopefulness, of invincibility in that his cause is just. France is too essentially democratic to esteem one set of characteristics in the mass of men and another set in the leaders of men.
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