your finger into your eye when I
reached my folk's garden.

"My heart was going top speed. I was all trembling from head to foot as
if I were only a sort of heart myself. And I had to hold myself back
from carrying on aloud, and in French too, I was so happy and upset.
The Kamarad says to me, 'You go, pass once, then another time, and look
in at the door and the window. Don't look as if you were looking. Be
careful.' So I get hold of myself again, and swallow my feelings all at
a gulp. Not a bad sort, that devil, seeing he'd have had a hell of a
time if I'd got nailed.

"At our place, you know, same as everywhere in the Pas de Calais, the
outside doors of the houses are cut in two. At the bottom, it's a sort
of barrier, half-way up your body; and above, you might call it a
shutter. So you can shut the bottom half and be one-half private.

"The top half was open, and the room, that's the dining-room, and the
kitchen as well, of course, was lighted up and I heard voices.

"I went by with my neck twisted sideways. There were heads of men and
women with a rosy light on them, round the round table and the lamp. My
eyes fell on her, on Clotilde. I saw her plainly. She was sitting
between two chaps, non-coms., I believe, and they were talking to her.
And what was she doing? Nothing; she was smiling, and her face was
prettily bent forward and surrounded with a light little framework of
fair hair, and the lamp gave it a bit of a golden look.

"She was smiling. She was contented. She had a look of being well off,
by the side of the Boche officer, and the lamp, and the fire that
puffed an unfamiliar warmth out on me. I passed, and then I turned
round, and passed again. I saw her again, and she was always smiling.
Not a forced smile, not a debtor's smile, non, a real smile that came
from her, that she gave. And during that time of illumination that I
passed in two senses, I could see my baby as well, stretching her hands
out to a great striped simpleton and trying to climb on his knee; and
then, just by, who do you think I recognized? Madeleine Vandaert,
Vandaert's wife, my pal of the 19th, that was killed at the Maine, at
Montyon.

"She knew he'd been killed because she was in mourning. And she, she
was having good fun, and laughing outright, I tell you--and she looked
at one and the other as much as to say, 'I'm all right here!'

"Ah, my boy, I cleared out of that, and butted into the Kamarads that
were waiting to take me