ain--Baby
_soixante-quinze_--An incident truly French.

This was another French day, an ultra French day, with Monsieur Elan
playfully inciting human nature to make holiday in the sight of bursting
shells. There had been many other luncheons with generals and staffs in
their chateaux which were delightful and illuminating occasions, but
this had a distinction of its own not only in its companionship but in
its surroundings.

_Mon lieutenant_ who invited me warned me to eat a light breakfast in
order to leave room for adequate material appreciation of the
hospitality of his own battalion, in which he had fought in the ranks
earning promotion and his _croix de guerre_ in a way that was more
gratifying to him than the possession of a fortune, chateaux and
high-powered cars. I have seen him in the streets of our town "hiking"
along with the French marching step arm-in-arm with two French
privates, though he was an officer. He introduced them as from "my
battalion!" with as much pride as if they were Generals Joffre and
Castelnau.

What a setting for a "swell repast," as he jokingly called it! A table
made of boxes with boxes for seats and plates of tin, under apple trees
looking down into a valley where the transport and blue-clad regiments
were winding their way past the eddies of men of the battalion in a rest
camp, with the _soixante-quinze_ firing from the slopes beyond at
intervals and a German battery trying to reach a British sausage balloon
hanging lazily in the still air against the blue sky and never getting
it. A flurry of figures after some "krumps" had burst at another point
meant that some men had been killed and wounded.

As the colonel and the second in command were not present there was no
restraint of seniority on the festivity, though I think that seniority
knowing what was going on might have felt lonely in its isolation. We
had many courses, soup, fish, entree and roast, salad and cheese which
was cheese in a land where they eat cheese, and luscious grapes and
pears; everything that the market afforded served in sight of the front
line. Why not? France thinks that nothing is too good for her fighters.
If ever man ought to have the best it is when to-morrow he returns to
the firing-line and hard rations--when to-morrow he may die for France.

The senior captain presided. He was a man of other wars, burned by the
suns of Morocco, with a military moustache that gave effect to his
spirited manner