and touching the rim of his helmet,
began: "Bonjour, Madame. Qu'est que c'est?"

She tried to speak, but went off into a spasm of coughing, only
able to gasp, "'Toinette, 'Toinette!"

'Toinette stepped quickly forward. She was about eleven, and
seemed to be the captain of the party. A bold, hard little face
with a long chin, straight black hair tied with rags, uneasy,
crafty eyes; she looked much less gentle and more experienced
than her mother. She began to explain, and she was very clever at
making herself understood. She was used to talking to foreign
soldiers,--spoke slowly, with emphasis and ingenious gestures.

She, too, had been reconnoitering. She had discovered the empty
farmhouse and was trying to get her party there for the night.
How did they come here? Oh, they were refugees. They had been
staying with people thirty kilometers from here. They were trying
to get back to their own village. Her mother was very sick,
presque morte and she wanted to go home to die. They had heard
people were still living there; an old aunt was living in their
own cellar,--and so could they if they once got there. The point
was, and she made it over and over, that her mother wished to die
chez elle, comprenez-vous? They had no papers, and the French
soldiers would never let them pass, but now that the Americans
were here they hoped to get through; the Americans were said to
be toujours gentils.

While she talked in her shrill, clicking voice, the baby began to
howl, dissatisfied with its nourishment. The little girl
shrugged. "Il est toujours en colere," she muttered. The woman
turned it around with difficulty--it seemed a big, heavy baby,
but white and sickly--and gave it the other breast. It began
sucking her noisily, rooting and sputtering as if it were
famished. It was too painful, it was almost indecent, to see this
exhausted woman trying to feed her baby. Claude beckoned his men
away to one side, and taking the little girl by the hand drew her
after them.

"Il faut que votre mere--se reposer," he told her, with the grave
caesural pause which he always made in the middle of a French
sentence. She understood him. No distortion of her native tongue
surprised or perplexed her. She was accustomed to being addressed
in all persons, numbers, genders, tenses; by Germans, English,
Americans. She only listened to hear whether the voice was kind,
and with men in this uniform it usually was kind.

Had they anything to eat? "V