One shell had fallen through the roof into my bedroom--that was all. But
ah, Madame! _Noyon, pauvre Noyon!_ She was like a corpse. _Ah lala,
lala! Que'malheur!_ The next day our soldiers came. Ah, how glad I was.
And I asked Sainte Claire, 'May I not go to the well and bring up a
bottle of wine?' And she said 'No, not yet.' So we waited, Madame, until
the day of the Armistice. Then Sainte Claire said, 'Now you may go and
bring up all the wine.' And, Madame, what do you think? I went to the
well and I hauled up the wine and out of the hundred bottles only two
were broken." The old woman laughed with delight at the trick she had
played on the invader.
"They never guessed it was there. It was Sainte Claire, Madame, who
saved it. I poured her a glassful and we celebrated, Madame; we
celebrated the victory down in our cave, _ma'tiote Sainte Claire_ and
I."
* * * * *
Mademoiselle Froissart and I left the _Poste de Secours_ one day, and
started for a far away village that was said to be utterly wiped out.
Our drive lay over a terrific road. We crossed a vast sad plain,
intersected with trenches, with nothing in sight but one monster
deserted tank, still camouflaged, and here and there the silhouette of
a blasted tree against the lowering sky. These dead trees of the battle
line! Sometimes, with their bony limbs flung forth in gnarled unnatural
gestures, they remind me of frantic skeletons suddenly petrified in
their dance of death.
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