gue or another in this
cursed place. I wonder when will I 'ave the luck to go sick again."

CHAPTER XX (p. 279)

THE WOMEN OF FRANCE

Lonely and still the village lies,
The houses asleep and the blinds all drawn.
The road is straight as the bullet flies,
And the east is touched with the tinge of dawn.

Shadowy forms creep through the night,
Where the coal-stacks loom in their ghostly lair;
A sentry's challenge, a spurt of light,
A scream as a woman's soul takes flight
Through the quivering morning air.

We had been working all morning in a cornfield near an _estaminet_ on
the La Bassee Road. The morning was very hot, and Pryor and I felt
very dry; in fact, when our corporal stole off on the heels of a
sergeant who stole off, we stole off to sin with our superiors by
drinking white wine in an _estaminet_ by the La Bassee Road.

"This is not the place to dig trenches," said the sergeant when we
entered.

"We're just going to draw out the plans of the new traverse," Pryor
explained. "It is to be made on a new principle, and a rifleman on
sentry-go can sleep there and get wind of the approach of a (p. 280)
sergeant by the vibration of stripes rubbing against the walls of the
trench."

"Every man in the battalion must not be in here," said the sergeant
looking at the khaki crowd and the full glasses. "I can't allow it and
the back room empty."

Pryor and I took the hint and went to the low roofed room in the rear,
where we found two persons, a woman and a man. The woman was sweating
over a stove, frying cutlets and the man was sitting on the floor
peeling potatoes into a large bucket. He was a thickset lump of a
fellow, with long, hairy arms, dark heavy eyebrows set firm over
sharp, inquisitive eyes, a snub nose, and a long scar stretching from
the butt of the left ear up to the cheekbone. He wore a nondescript
pair of loose baggy trousers, a fragment of a shirt and a pair of
bedroom slippers. He peeled the potatoes with a knife, a long
rapier-like instrument which he handled with marvellous dexterity.

"Digging trenches?" he asked, hurling a potato into the bucket.

I understand French spoken slowly, Pryor, who was educated in Paris,
speaks French and he told the potato-peeler that we had been at work
since five o'clock that morning.

"The Germans will never get back here again unless as prisoners." (p. 281)

"They m