is
duty--Labbe that he had another hour's sleep and more, and that he was
to take my horses: I, that I must rise and get off to the square.

Then the sergeant went out of the barn, cursing the straw on his spurs,
and I lit a match and brushed down my clothes and ran off to the square.
It was not yet two in the morning.

The gunners were drawn up in a double line, and we reserve drivers stood
separate (there were only a dozen of us), and when they formed fours we
were at the tail. There was a lieutenant with us and a sergeant, also
two bombardiers--all mounted; and so we went off, keeping step till we
were out of the town, and then marching as we chose and thanking God for
the change. For it is no easy matter for drivers to march with gunners;
their swords impede them, and though the French drivers have not the
ridiculous top-boots that theatricalise other armies, yet even their
simple boots are not well suited for the road.

This custom of sending forward reserve drivers on foot, in rotation, has
a fine name to it. It is called "Haut-le-pied," "High-the-foot," and
must therefore be old.

A little way out of the town we had leave to sing, and we began, all
together, one of those long and charming songs with which the French
soldiery make-believe to forget the tedium of the road and the hardship
of arms.

Now, if a man desired to answer once and for all those pedants who
refuse to understand the nature of military training (both those who
make a silly theatre-show of it and those who make it hideous and
diabolical), there could be no better way than to let him hear the songs
of soldiers. In the French service, at least, these songs are a whole
expression of the barrack-room; its extreme coarseness, its steady and
perpetual humour, its hatred of the hard conditions of discipline; and
also these songs continually portray the distant but delightful picture
of things--I mean of things rare and far off--which must lie at the back
of men's minds when they have much work to do with their hands and much
living in the open air and no women to pour out their wine.

Moreover, these songs have another excellent quality. They show all
through that splendid unconsciousness of the soldier, that inability in
him to see himself from without, or to pose as civilians always think
and say he poses.

We sang that morning first, the chief and oldest of the songs. It dates
from the Flemish wars of Louis XIV, and is called "Aupres de ma