papers issued down the road by Headquarters, at the D.E.S. He
felt that some one ought to know these facts about himself, these
extenuating circumstances, in case of trouble. Yet he hesitated to
give himself away. Bad as it was, there were worse jobs than sentry
duty.

A little way down the road there was an _estaminet_, where he slept
when he could, where he spent his leisure hours, where he bought as
much wine as he could pay for. But his sentry box always confronted
him, which leaked when it rained, and the wind blew through it, and on
certain days, when there was much travel by the road, he hardly spent
a moment inside it but was always standing in the mud and wind of the
highway, waving his flag, and stopping impatient, snorting motors. And
always pretending that he could read the pink and blue papers, angrily
thrust out for his inspection. Too great a responsibility for one who
could barely read and write.

Came the time, eventually, for his leave. Five days permission. One
day to get to Paris. One day from Paris to his province. One day in
his province at home with his wife. One day back to Paris, one day to
get back to his sentry box in the First Zone of the Armies. Not much
time, all considered. He bought a bottle of wine at the _estaminet_,
and got aboard the train for Paris. Somewhere along the route came a
long stop, and he bought another bottle of wine--forty centimes.
Another stop, and another bottle of wine. He thought much of his wife
during these long hours of the journey--thoughts augmented and made
glowing by three bottles of wine. She wasn't so bad, after all.

The Gare Montparnasse was reached, and he got off, dizzily, to change
trains. He knew, vaguely, that to get to his province in the interior,
he must first somehow get to the Gare du Nord. There was a Metro
entrance somewhere about the Gare Montparnasse and he tried to find
it. The Metro would take him to the Gare du Nord. No good. Such crowds
of people all about, and they called him Mon Vieux, and pulled him
this way and that, laughing with him, offering him cigarettes and
happy comments, received by a brain in which three bottles of wine
were already fermenting. Thus it happened that he missed the Metro
entrance, and instead of finding a metro to take him to the Gare du
Nord, he missed the entrance, turned quite wrong, and walked up the
middle of the rue de la Gaiete. And because of the three bottles of
wine within him--entirely within his