ght hold of the
soldier by the wrist and tried to drag him away. The crowd murmured a
protest, and then suddenly the poilu, finding himself in the hands
of the police, on this one day out of the trenches--after five
months--flung himself on the pavement in a passion of tears and
supplication.

"Je suis pere de famille!... Je suis un soldat de France!... Dans les
tranchees pour cinq mois!... Qu'est-ce que mes camarades vont dire, 'cre
nom de Dieu? et mon capitaine? C'est emmordant apres toute ma service
comme brave soldat. Mais, quoi donc, mon vieux!"

"Viens donc, saligaud," growled the agent de police.

The crowd was against the policeman. Their murmurs rose to violent
protest on behalf of the poilu.

"C'est un heros, tout de meme. Cinq mois dans les tranches! C'est
affreux! Mais oui, il est soul, mais pour--quoi pas! Apres cinq mois sur
le front qu'est-ce que cela signifie? Ca n'a aucune importance!"

A dandy French officer of Chasseurs Alpins stepped into the center of
the scene and tapped the policeman on the shoulder.

"Leave him alone. Don't you see he is a soldier? Sacred name of God,
don't you know that a man like this has helped to save France, while you
pigs stand at street corners watching petticoats?"

He stooped to the fallen man and helped him to stand straight.

"Be off with you, mon brave, or there will be trouble for you."

He beckoned to two of his own Chasseurs and said:

"Look after that poor comrade yonder. He is un peu etoile."

The crowd applauded. Their sympathy was all for the drunken soldier of
France.

V

Into a small estaminet at the end of the rue des Trois Cailloux, beyond
the Hotel de Ville, came one day during the battles of the Somme two
poilus, grizzled, heavy men, deeply bronzed, with white dust in their
wrinkles, and the earth of the battlefields ingrained in the skin of
their big, coarse hands. They ordered two "little glasses" and drank
them at one gulp. Then two more.

"See what I have got, my little cabbage," said one of them, stooping to
the heavy pack which he had shifted from his shoulders to the other seat
beside him. "It is something to make you laugh."

"And what is that, my old one?" said a woman sitting on the other side
of the marble-topped table, with another woman of her own class, from
the market nearby.

The man did not answer the question, but fumbled into his pack, laughing
a little in a self-satisfied way.

"I killed a German to get it