A sentry stood by the ruined bridge, a small, well-knit man with beautiful silver-gray hair, blue eyes, and pink cheeks; his uniform was exceptionally clean, and he appeared to be some decent burgher torn from his customary life.  I fell into conversation with him.  He recollected that his father, a veteran of 1870, had prophesied the present war.

“‘We shall see them again, the spiked helmets (les casques a pointe),’ said my father—­’we shall see them again.’

“‘Why?’ I asked him.

“‘Because they have eaten of us, and will be hungry once more.’”

The principal street of the town led from this bridge to a great square, and continued straight on toward Maidieres and Montauville.  The sidewalks around this square were in arcades under the houses, for the second story of every building projected for seven or eight feet over the first and rested on a line of arches at the edge of the street.  To avoid damage from shells bursting in the open space, every one of these arcades, and there were perhaps a hundred all told, had been plugged with sandbags, so that the square had an odd, blind look.  A little life flickered in the damp, dark alleys behind these obstructions.  There was a tobacco shop, kept by two pretty young women whom the younger soldiers were always jollying, a wineshop, a tailorshop, and a bookstore, always well supplied with the great Parisian weeklies, which one found later in odd corners of shelters in the trenches.  Occasionally a soldier bought a serious book when it was to be found in the dusty files of the “Collection Nelson”; I remember seeing a young lieutenant of artillery buying Segur’s “Histoire de la Grande Armee en 1812,” and another taking Flaubert’s “Un coeur simple.”  But the military life, roughly lived, and shared with simple people, appears to make even the wisest boyish, and after a while at the front the intellect will not read anything intellectual.  It simply won’t, perhaps because it can’t.  The soldier mind delights in rough, genial, and simple jokes.  A sergeant, whom I knew to be a distinguished young scholar in civilian life, was always throwing messages wrapped round a stone into the German trenches; the messages were killingly funny, amiably indecent, and very jejune.  Invariably they provoked a storm of grenades, and sometimes epistles in the same vein from the Boches.  In spite of the vicious pang of the grenades, there was an absurd “Boys-will-be-boys” air to the whole performance.  Conversation, however, did not sink to this boyish level, and the rag-tag and bob-tail of one’s cultivation found its outlet in speech.