But during the week he was here I got accustomed to seeing him sit before the fire every evening after dinner for a little chat before turning in.  He was more ready to talk politics than war, and full of curiosity about “your Mr. Wilson,” as he called him.  Now and then he talked military matters, but it was technique, and the strategy of war, not the events.  He is an enthusiastic soldier, and to him, of course, the cavalry is still “la plus belle arme de France.”  He loved to explain the use of cavalry in modern warfare, of what it was yet to do in the offensive, armed as it is today with the same weapons as the infantry, carrying carbines, having its hand-grenade divisions, its mitrailleuses, ready to go into action as cavalry, arriving like a flash au galop, over ground where the infantry must move slowly, and with difficulty, and ready at any time to dismount and fight on foot, to finish a pursuit begun as cavalry.  It all sounded very logical as he described it.

He had been under bombardment, been on dangerous scouting expeditions, but never yet in a charge, which is, of course, his ambitious dream.  There was an expression of real regret in his voice when he said one evening:  “Helas!  I have not yet had the smallest real opportunity to distinguish myself.”

I reminded him that he was still very young.

He looked at me quite indignantly as he replied:  “Madame forgets that there are Aspirants no older than I whose names are already inscribed on the roll of honor.”

You see an elderly lady, unused to a soldier’s point of view, may be very sympathetic, and yet blunder as a comforter.

The releve passed off quietly.  It was all in the routine of the soldiers’ lives.  They did not even know that it was picturesque.  It was late last Friday night that an orderly brought the news that the order had come to move on the morning of the eleventh—­three days later,—­and it was not until the night of the fifteenth that we were again settled down to quiet.

The squad we had here moved in two divisions.  Early Monday morning—­the eleventh—­the horses were being saddled, and at ten o’clock they began to move.  One half of them were in full equipment.  The other half acted as an escort as far as Meaux, from which place they led back the riderless horses.

The officers explained it all to me.  The division starting that day for the trenches dismounted at Meaux, and took a train for the station nearest to the Foret de Laigue.  There they had their hot soup and waited for night, to march into the trenches under cover of the darkness.  They told me that it was not a long march, but it was a hard one, as it was up hill, over wet and clayey ground, where it was difficult not to slip back as fast as they advanced.

On arriving at the trenches they would find the men they were to relieve ready to march out, to slip and slide down the hill to the railway, where they would have their morning coffee, and await the train for Meaux, where they were due at noon next day—­barring delays.