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So the ball is started and goes rolling from one man to another in the ranks, growing in audacity and wallowing along filthy ways of thought, until the sous-officier, who had been grinning under his kepi, suddenly turns red with anger and growls out a protest. "Taisez-vous, cochons. Foutez-moi la paix!"
Scarcely had the major left us, when the corporal crept closely to my side, and with that mingled respect and familiarity a French sous-officier assumes so naturally, said, "You wished to see something of a skirmish, Captain, I suppose? Well, you're like enough to be gratified; we're closing up rapidly now." "What may be the strength of your battalion, Corporal?"
And he finds that the officer is a spy a Bosche. He have no more trouble with his eyes," added the paperhanger laconically. It was too good a story to spoil by cross-examination, so I left it at that. "You like the bayonet?" I asked. "Ah, yes! we love the bayonet. It is a bon enfant," said the sous-officier. I remember we caught them once in a quarry.
When he went out, he always asked his adversary, 'Where will you like it? your lungs, your heart, your brain? It is quite a matter of choice; and whichever they chose, he shot there. Le pauvre Rire-pour-tout! He was always good-natured." "And did he never meet his match?" asked a sous-officier of the line. The speaker looked down on the piou-piou with superb contempt, and twisted his mustaches.
The man was in soiled overalls, and reeling drunk. "That is Baufré," said Ducat. "He is always drunk. He married the daughter of an Irish trader, a former officer in the British Indian Light Cavalry. Baufré was a sous-officier in the French forces here. There is no native blood in those girls. What will become of them, I wonder?" A few hundred yards further on was the palace.
This was their arrangement: An open space, sometimes used as a woodyard, was next the garden of the Hotel Campvallon. The General had purchased a portion of it and had had a cottage erected in the midst of a kitchen-garden, and had placed in it, with his usual kind-heartedness, an old 'sous-officier', named Mesnil, who had served under him in the artillery.
Half-way down this silent little street they halted: the sous-officier dismounted and opened the door of the tonneau, politely assisting the girl to alight. Her companion followed her, and the sous-officier conducted them into a stucco house, the worn limestone step of which gave directly on the grass-grown sidewalk.
Our boat grated on the pebbles, and in order to leave it, we were compelled to walk on an oar as if it were a tight-rope. Ensconced between the citadel and its ramparts, and cut in two by an almost empty port, the Palay appeared to us a useless little town overcome with military ennui, and put me in mind, I do not know why, of a gaping sous-officier.
In the middle of the melée, Prince Louis found himself engaged with a sous-officier of the 10th Hussars named Guindet, who summoned him to surrender; the prince replied with a slash of his sword which cut the sous-officier's face, who thereupon ran the prince through and killed him.
"They still had the cards in their hands, monsieur, just as you see us and they hadn't got a scratch. They were like the statues in the Louvre." "Yes," said the sous-officier, "I have seen them like that. I remember I found a big Bosche six feet four he must have been sitting dead in a house which we had shelled.
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