er in life, with good pals about them. They
wanted to make the best of it--and damn the price. In that spirit many
of them went after other pleasures--down the byways of the city, and
damned the price again, which was a hellish one. Who blames them? It was
war that was to blame, and those who made war possible.

Down the rue des Trois Cailloux, up and down, up and down, went English,
and Scottish, and Irish, and Welsh, and Canadian, and Australian, and
New Zealand fighting--men. In the winter they wore their trench-coats
all splashed and caked up to the shoulders with the white, chalky mud of
the Somme battlefields, and their top--boots and puttees were plastered
with this mud, and their faces were smeared with it after a lorry drive
or a tramp down from the line. The rain beat with a metallic tattoo on
their steel hats. Their packs were all sodden.

French poilus, detrained at Amiens station for a night on their way to
some other part of the front, jostled among British soldiers, and their
packs were a wonder to see. They were like traveling tinkers, with pots
and pans and boots slung about their faded blue coats, and packs bulging
with all the primitive needs of life in the desert of the battlefields
beyond civilization. They were unshaven, and wore their steel casques
low over their foreheads, without gaiety, without the means of buying
a little false hilarity, but grim and sullen--looking and resentful of
English soldiers walking or talking with French cocottes.

IV

I saw a scene with a French poilu one day in the Street of the Three
Pebbles, during those battles of the Somme, when the French troops were
fighting on our right from Maricourt southward toward Roye. It was like
a scene from "Gaspard." The poilu was a middle-aged man, and very drunk
on some foul spirit which he had bought in a low cafe down by the river.
In the High Street he was noisy, and cursed God for having allowed the
war to happen, and the French government for having sentenced him and
all poor sacre poilus to rot to death in the trenches, away from
their wives and children, without a thought for them; and nothing but
treachery in Paris:

"Nous sommes trahis!" said the man, raising his arms. "For the hundredth
time France is betrayed."

A crowd gathered round him, listening to his drunken denunciations. No
one laughed. They stared at him with a kind of pitying wonderment. An
agent de police pushed his way between the people and cau