"Oh, damn the Boches!" responded the fourrier on
a deeper note.

"And like all those village workmen, they got half
their living out of their garden and a field or two. And
you've read what the Boches did to the gardens and fruit-
trees."

"Isn't there anything else we can talk about?" said
the fourtier.

Nidart passed through Paris on his way (those being
before the days of strictly one-destination furloughs)
and, extracting some very old bills from the lining of his
shoe, he spent the five hours between his trains in hasty
purchasing. At the hardware shop, where he bought an
ax, a hammer, some nails, and a saw, the saleswoman's
vivacious curiosity got the better of his taciturnity, and
she screwed from him the information that he was going
back to his home in the devastated regions.

At once the group of Parisian working-people and
bourgeois who happened to be in the shop closed in on
him sympathetically, commenting, advising, dissuading,
offering their opinions with that city-bred, glib-tongued
clatter which Nidart's country soul scorned and de-
tested.

"No, no, my friend, it's useless to try to go back.
The Germans have made a desert of it. My cousin's
wife has a relative who was in the regiment that first
followed the Germans after their retreat from Noyon,
and he said . . ."

"The Government is going to issue a statement, say-

-29-