ling
of something dreadful being close at hand; there was an air of
expectancy about it and one felt there was a marked atmosphere of
nerves about. You might be sniped from the house opposite, or blown out
of the windows by a seventeen-inch shell. You never know. The man who
sold you tobacco the day before might be lying stiff in the gutter next
day, or more probably still, he might be dining with the German Staff a
mile and a half away. All this uncertainty, coupled with the fact that
the place was full of spies, and that valuable information had been
finding its way through to the German lines, made the General decide to
withdraw his troops and take up some trenches behind it.

Boudru sat on the big armchair and swung his white bare legs defiantly.
Perhaps it had better be explained that my lord Boudru was five years
old. "Boudru going to shut eye?" said the fat infantry sergeant
suggestively.

"The cots are down and the beds unrolled," said the R.H.A. man falling
into the diction of the barrack-room.

"No," said Boudru. "You must tell me for the last time the story about
the wicked German baby killer who was turned into a pig. The man of the
guns must tell it, and the fat man of the infantry shall hide beneath
the bed and make pig shrieks--many pig shrieks--at the time when he is
killed."

"But we shall disturb little sister Elise," said the fat sergeant with
visions of a dismal ten minutes wedged beneath the small cot and the
floor.

"Elise is not bye-o yet," piped a thin voice from where two eyes were
sparkling elfishly from a tangle of golden locks.

"Go on, my English man--There was once a big fat baby killer who lived
in Potsdam ..."

Then the R.H.A. man (a journalist by profession, a duke by inclination,
and now by destiny a very clever gunner) began the famous story. Never
before had the telling of that tale been given with such splendour of
effect. The fat sergeant had made pig-noises with multitudinous yells in
at least fifteen different keys, and the little cross-eyed driver of the
Engineers had dressed up in a real Hun helmet and grey coat. The grand
finale in which the Engineer had turned into a pig on all fours and had
been mercilessly put to death with the fat sergeant's bayonet, had
filled Boudru's soul with joy. He reflected and gloated on the scene far
into the night. Then he fell fast asleep and met with most dazzling
adventures with a German soldier who had been hiding in the Jacobean oak