Twelve months of bad roads in a shelled district had left him
full of talk, as soon as he was well lit.
Up at Nieuport, last northern stand of the Allied line, a walking
merchant would call each day, a basket around his throat, and in the
hamper chocolate, fruit, and tobacco. A muddy, unshaven Brittany
sailor, out of his few sous a week, bought us cigars. The less men have,
the more generous they are. That is an old saying, but it drove home to
me when I had poor men do me courtesy day by day for five months. As we
motored in and out of Nieuport in the dark of the night, we passed
hundreds of silent men trudging through the mud of the gutter. They were
troops that had been relieved who were marching back for a rest. As soon
as they came out of the zone where no sound can be made and no light
shown, we saw here and there down the invisible ranks the sudden flare
of a match, and then the glow in the cup of the hand, as the man
prepared to cheer himself.
A more somber and lonely watch even than that of these French sailors
was the vigil kept by our good Belgian friend, Commandant Gilson, in the
shattered village of Pervyse. With his old Maltese cat, he prowled
through the wrecked place till two and three of the morning, waiting for
Germans to cross the flooded fields. For him cigarettes were an endless
chain that went through his life. From the expiring stub he lit his
fresh smoke, as if he were maintaining a vestal flame.
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