same.
Perhaps he can find convivial comrades. He approaches the central part
of the village just when night has buried the earth.

The lighted doors and windows of the taverns shine again in the mud of
the main street. There are taverns every twenty paces. One dimly sees
the heavy specters of soldiers, mostly in groups, descending the
street. When a motor-car comes along, they draw aside to let it pass,
dazzled by the head-lights, and bespattered by the liquid mud that the
wheels hurl over the whole width of the road.

The taverns are full. Through the steamy windows one can see they are
packed with compact clouds of helmeted men. Fouillade goes into one or
two, on chance. Once over the threshold, the dram-shop's tepid breath,
the light, the smell and the hubbub, affect him with longing. This
gathering at tables is at least a fragment of the past in the present.

He looks from table to table, and disturbs the groups as he goes up to
scrutinize all the merrymakers in the room. Alas, he knows no one!
Elsewhere, it is the same; he has no luck. In vain he has extended his
neck and sent his desperate glances in search of a familiar head among
the uniformed men who in clumps or couples drink and talk or in
solitude write. He has the air of a cadger, and no one pays him heed.

Finding no soul to come to his relief, he decides to invest at least
what he has in his pocket. He slips up to the counter. "A pint of
wine--and good."

"White?"

"Eh, oui."

"You, mon garcon, you're from the South," says the landlady, handing
him a little full bottle and a glass, and gathering his twelve sous.

He places himself at the corner of a table already overcrowded by four
drinkers who are united in a game of cards. He fills the glass to the
brim and empties it, then fills it again.

"Hey, good health to you! Don't drink the tumbler!" yelps in his face a
man who arrives in the dirty blue jumper of fatigues, and displays a
heavy cross-bar of eyebrows across his pale face, a conical head, and
half a pound's weight of ears. It is Harlingue, the armorer.

It is not very glorious to be seated alone before a pint in the
presence of a comrade who gives signs of thirst. But Fouillade pretends
not to understand the requirements of the gentleman who dallies in
front of him with an engaging smile, and he hurriedly empties his
glass. The other turns his back, not without grumbling that "they're
not very generous, but on the contrary greedy, thes