And--being Jean he shrugged his shoulders.

They fell to discussing ways and means. The chocolate could be cut out,

but not the cigarettes. Sara Lee, arguing vehemently for them and

trying to forget other things, remembered suddenly how Uncle James had

hated cigarettes, and that Harvey himself disapproved of them. Somehow

Harvey seemed, those days, to present a constant figure of disapproval.

He gave her no moral support.

At Jean's suggestion she added to her report of so many men fed with

soup, so much tobacco, sort not specified, so many small wounds

dressed--a request that if possible her allowance be increased. She did

it nervously, but when the letter had gone she felt a great relief. She

enclosed a snapshot of the little house.

Jean, as it happens, had lied about Henri. Not once, but several times.

He had told Marie, for instance, that Henri was in England, and later

on he told Rene. Then, having done his errand, he drove six miles back

along the main road to Dunkirk and picked up Henri, who was sitting on

the bank of a canal watching an ammunition train go by.

Jean backed into a lane and turned the car round. After that Henri got

in and they went rapidly back toward the Front. It was a different

Henri, however, who left the car a mile from the crossroads--a Henri in

the uniform of a French private soldier, one of those odd and

impracticable uniforms of France during the first year, baggy dark blue

trousers, stiff cap, and the long-tailed coat, its skirts turned back

and faced. Round his neck he wore a knitted scarf, which covered his

chin, and, true to the instinct of the French peasant in a winter

campaign, he wore innumerable undergarments, the red of a jersey showing

through rents in his coat.

Gone were Henri's long clean lines, his small waist and broad shoulders,

the swing of his walk. Instead, he walked with the bent-kneed swing of

the French infantryman, that tireless but awkward marching step which

renders the French Army so mobile.

He carried all the impedimenta of a man going into the trenches, an

extra jar of water, a flat loaf of bread strapped to his haversack, and

an intrenching tool jingling at his belt.

Even Jean smiled as he watched him moving along toward the crowded

crossroads--smiled and then sighed. For Jean had lost everything in

the war. His wife had died of a German bullet long months before, and

with her had gone a child much prayed for and soon to come. But Henri

had brought back to Jean something to live for--or to die for, as might

happen.




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