One soldier was giving a delighted little
girl a ride on his back.

After the funeral every man in the Company found some sympathetic
woman to talk to about his fallen comrades. All the garden
flowers and bead wreaths in Beaufort had been carried out and put
on the American graves. When the squad fired over them and the
bugle sounded, the girls and their mothers wept. Poor Willy Katz,
for instance, could never have had such a funeral in South Omaha.

The next night the soldiers began teaching the girls to dance the
"Pas Seul" and the "Fausse Trot." They had found an old violin in
the town; and Oscar, the Swede, scraped away on it. They danced
every evening. Claude saw that a good deal was going on, and he
lectured his men at parade. But he realized that he might as well
scold at the sparrows. Here was a village with several hundred
women, and only the grandmothers had husbands. All the men were
in the army; hadn't even been home on leave since the Germans
first took the place. The girls had been shut up for four years
with young men who incessantly coveted them, and whom they must
constantly outwit. The situation had been intolerable--and
prolonged. The Americans found themselves in the position of Adam
in the garden.

"Did you know, sir," said Bert Fuller breathlessly as he overtook
Claude in the street after parade, "that these lovely girls had
to go out in the fields and work, raising things for those dirty
pigs to eat? Yes, sir, had to work in the fields, under German
sentinels; marched out in the morning and back at night like
convicts! It's sure up to us to give them a good time now."

One couldn't walk out of an evening without meeting loitering
couples in the dusky streets and lanes. The boys had lost all
their bashfulness about trying to speak French. They declared
they could get along in France with three verbs, and all,
happily, in the first conjugation: manger, aimer, payer,--quite
enough! They called Beaufort "our town," and they were called
"our Americans." They were going to come back after the war, and
marry the girls, and put in waterworks!

"Chez-moi, sir!" Bill Gates called to Claude, saluting with a
bloody hand, as he stood skinning rabbits before the door of his
billet. "Bunny casualties are heavy in town this week!"

"You know, Wheeler," David remarked one morning as they were
shaving, "I think Maxey would come back here on one leg if he
knew about these excursions into the forest after mu