ri's manner
before his departure. They had quarreled, these two. Perhaps it was as
well, though Jean was by now a convert to Sara Lee. But he looked out,
those days, on but half a world, did Jean. So he saw only the woman
hunger in Henri, and nothing deeper. And in Sara Lee a woman, and
nothing more.

And--being Jean he shrugged his shoulders.

They fell to discussing ways and means. The chocolate could be cut out,
but not the cigarettes. Sara Lee, arguing vehemently for them and
trying to forget other things, remembered suddenly how Uncle James had
hated cigarettes, and that Harvey himself disapproved of them. Somehow
Harvey seemed, those days, to present a constant figure of disapproval.
He gave her no moral support.

At Jean's suggestion she added to her report of so many men fed with
soup, so much tobacco, sort not specified, so many small wounds
dressed--a request that if possible her allowance be increased. She did
it nervously, but when the letter had gone she felt a great relief. She
enclosed a snapshot of the little house.

Jean, as it happens, had lied about Henri. Not once, but several times.
He had told Marie, for instance, that Henri was in England, and later
on he told Rene. Then, having done his errand, he drove six miles back
along the main road to Dunkirk and picked up Henri, who was sitting on
the bank of a canal watching an ammunition train go by.

Jean backed into a lane and turned the car round. After that Henri got
in and they went rapidly back toward the Front. It was a different
Henri, however, who left the car a mile from the crossroads--a Henri in
the uniform of a French private soldier, one of those odd and
impracticable uniforms of France during the first year, baggy dark blue
trousers, stiff cap, and the long-tailed coat, its skirts turned back
and faced. Round his neck he wore a knitted scarf, which covered his
chin, and, true to the instinct of the French peasant in a winter
campaign, he wore innumerable undergarments, the red of a jersey showing
through rents in his coat.

Gone were Henri's long clean lines, his small waist and broad shoulders,
the swing of his walk. Instead, he walked with the bent-kneed swing of
the French infantryman, that tireless but awkward marching step which
renders the French Army so mobile.

He carried all the impedimenta of a man going into the trenches, an
extra jar of water, a flat loaf of bread strapped to his haversack, and
an intrenching tool jing