I often mean to send you a picture of that group of ruins--there are five buildings in it. They were originally all joined together, but some of them have had to be pulled down because they got too dangerous to stand, and in the open spaces there is, in one place, a pavement of red tiles, and in another the roof to a cellar, with stone steps leading up to it. Not a bit of it is of any use to anyone, though the cellars under them are used to store vegetables, and Amélie keeps rabbits in one.
It was while we were arranging all this, and Amélie was assuring them that they were welcome, but that she would not guarantee that the whole group of ruins would not fall on their heads (and everything was as gay as if we were arranging a week-end picnic rather than a shelter for soldiers right out of the trenches), that the adjutant explained how it happened that, in the third year of the war, the fighting regiments were, for the first time, retiring as far as our hill for their repos.
He told us that almost all the cavalry had been dismounted to do infantry work in the trenches, but their horses were stalled in the rear. It had been found that the horses were an embarrassment so near to the battle-front, and so it had been decided to retire them further behind the line, and send out part of the men to keep them exercised and in condition, giving the men in turn three weeks in the trenches and three weeks out.
They had first withdrawn the horses to Nanteuil-le-Haudrouin a little northwest of us, about halfway between us and the trenches in the Forêt de Laigue. But that cantonnement had not been satisfactory, so they had retired here.
By sundown everything was arranged--four hundred horses along the hilltop, and, they tell us, over fifteen thousand along the valley. We were told that the men were leaving Nanteuil the next morning, and would arrive during the afternoon.
It was just dusk on Monday when they began riding up the hill, each mounted man leading two riderless horses.
It was just after they passed that there came a knock at the salon door.
I opened it with some curiosity. When you are to lodge a soldier in a house as intimately arranged as this one is, I defy anyone not to be curious as to what the lodger is to be like.