one sits down on empty
herring-boxes and vegetable cases to wait calmly for the exasperating
Boches to finish their nonsense. There is a smell of kerosene oil and
onions in the air. A lantern, always on hand for just such an emergency,
burns in a corner. "Have you had a bad time in the trenches this week,
Monsieur Levrault?" says the epiciere to a big, stolid soldier who is a
regular customer.
"No, quite passable, Madame Champaubert."
"And Monsieur Petticollot, how is he?"
"Very well, thank you, madame. His captain was killed by a rifle grenade
last week."
"Oh, the poor man."
Crash goes a shell. Everybody wonders where it has fallen. In a few
seconds the eclats rain down into the street.
"Dirty animals," says the voice of the old man in the darkest of all the
corners.
Madame Champaubert begins the story of how a cousin of hers who keeps a
grocery-shop at Mailly, near the frontier, was cheated by a Boche
tinware salesman. The cellar listens sympathetically. The boy says
nothing, but keeps his eyes fixed on the soldiers. In about twenty
minutes the bombardment ends, and the bolder ones go out to ascertain
the damage. The soldier's purchases are lying on the counter. These he
stuffs into his musette, the cloth wallet beloved of the poilu, and
departs. The colonel's cook comes in; he has got hold of a good ham and
wants to deck it out with herbs and capers. Has madame any capers? While
she is getting them, the colonel's cook retails the cream of all the
regimental gossip.
These people of Lorraine who have stayed behind, "Lorrains," the French
term them, are thoroughly French, though there is some German blood in
their veins. This Teuton addition is of very ancient date, being due to
the constant invasions which have swept up the valley of the Moselle.
This intermingling of the races, however, continued right up to 1870,
but since then the union of French and German stock has been rare. It
was most frequent, perhaps, during the years between 1804 and 1850, when
Napoleon's domination of the principalities and states along the Rhine
led to a French social and commercial invasion of Rhenish Germany, an
invasion which ended only with the growth of German nationalism. The
middle classes in particular intermarried because they were more apt to
be engaged in commerce. But since 1870, two barriers, one geographic
--annexed Lorraine, and one intellectual--hatred, have kept the
neighbors apart. The Lorrain of to-day
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