hat road in 1916," said the schoolmaster,
drawing a hand over his watery blue eyes. "That, you know, is the Voie
Sacree, the sacred way that saved Verdun. All day, all day, a double
line of camions went up, full of ammunition and ravitaillement and men."

"Oh, the poor boys, we saw so many go up," came the voice, dry as the
rustling of the wind in the vine-leaves, of the grey old woman who stood
leaning against the schoolmaster's chair, looking out through a gap in
the trellis at the rutted road so thick with dust, "and never have we
seen one of them come back."

"It was for France."

"But this was a nice village before the war. From Verdun to Bar-le-Duc,
the Courrier des Postes used to tell us, there was no such village, so
clean and with such fine orchards." The old woman leaned over the
schoolmaster's shoulder, joining eagerly in the conversation.

"Even now the fruit is very fine," said Martin.

"But you soldiers, you steal it all," said the old woman, throwing out
her arms. "You leave us nothing, nothing."

"We don't begrudge it," said the schoolmaster, "all we have is our
country's."

"We shall starve then...."

As she spoke the glasses on the table shook. With a roar of heavy wheels
and a grind of gears a camion went by.

"O good God!" The old woman looked out on to the road with terror in her
face, blinking her eyes in the thick dust.

Roaring with heavy wheels, grinding with gears, throbbing with motors,
camion after camion went by, slowly, stridently. The men packed into the
camions had broken through the canvas covers and leaned out, waving
their arms and shouting.

"Oh, the poor children," said the old woman, wringing her hands, her
voice lost in the roar and the shouting.

"They should not destroy property that way," said the schoolmaster....
"Last year it was dreadful. There were mutinies."

Martin sat, his chair tilted back, his hands trembling, staring with
compressed lips at the men who jolted by on the strident, throbbing
camions. A word formed in his mind: tumbrils.

In some trucks the men were drunk and singing, waving their bidons in
the air, shouting at people along the road, crying out all sorts of
things: "Get to the front!" "Into the trenches with them!" "Down with
the war!" In others they sat quiet, faces corpse-like with dust. Through
the gap in the trellis Martin stared at them, noting intelligent faces,
beautiful faces, faces brutally gay, miserable faces like those of
sobb