n it
shut up. In the end we got out, and I found--the limit, that was--that
we had to pad the hoof to the last station.

"Never, old man, have I been in such weather. It had rained for six
days. For six days the sky washed the earth and then washed it again.
The earth was softening and shifting, and filling up the holes and
making new ones."

"Same here--it only stopped raining this morning."

"It was just my luck. And everywhere there were swollen new streams,
washing away the borders of the fields as though they were lines on
paper. There were hills that ran with water from top to bottom. Gusts
of wind sent the rain in great clouds flying and whirling about, and
lashing our hands and faces and necks.

"So you bet, when I had tramped to the station, if some one had pulled
a really ugly face at me, it would have been enough to make me turn
back.

"But when we did get to the place, there were several of us--some more
men on leave--they weren't bound for Villers, but they had to go
through it to get somewhere else. So it happened that we got there in a
lump--five old cronies that didn't know each other.

"I could make out nothing of anything. They've been worse shelled over
there than here, and then there was the water everywhere, and it was
getting dark.

"I told you there are only four houses in the little place, only
they're a good bit off from each other. You come to the lower end of a
slope. I didn't know too well where I was, no more than my pals did,
though they belonged to the district and had some notion of the lay of
it--and all the less because of the rain falling in bucketsful.

"It got so bad that we couldn't keep from hurrying and began to run. We
passed by the farm of the Alleux--that's the first of the houses--and
it looked like a sort of stone ghost. Bits of walls like splintered
pillars standing up out of the water; the house was shipwrecked. The
other farm, a little further, was as good as drowned dead.

"Our house is the third. It's on the edge of the road that runs along
the top of the slope. We climbed up, facing the rain that beat on us in
the dusk and began to blind us--the cold and wet fairly smacked us in
the eye, flop!--and broke our ranks like machine-guns.

"The house! I ran like a greyhound--like an African attacking.
Mariette! I could see her with her arms raised high in the doorway
behind that fine curtain of night and rain--of rain so fierce that it
drove her back and kept her