"You will have a glass of wine, won't you?"
"Julie, fetch a bottle, you know which.... How is the morale?"
"I thought they looked a little discontented."
"No.... It's always like that.... They were yelling at some gendarmes. If they strung up a couple it would serve them right, dirty beasts."
"You soldiers are all one against the gendarmes."
"Yes. We fight the enemy but we hate the gendarmes." The commandant rubbed his hands, drank his wine and laughed.
"Hah! There's the next convoy. I must go."
The commandant shrugged his shoulders, clicked his heels together at the garden gate, saluted, smiling, and was gone.
Again the village street was full of the grinding roar and throb of camions, full of a frenzy of wheels and drunken shouting.
And the old grey woman wrung her hands and said:
"Oh, the poor children, they know they are going to death!"
Martin, rolled up in his bedroll on the floor of the empty hayloft, woke with a start.
"Say, Howe!" Tom Randolph, who lay next him, was pressing his hand. "I think I heard a shell go over."
As he spoke there came a shrill, loudening whine, and an explosion that shook the barn. A little dirt fell down on Martin's face.
"Say, fellers, that was damn near," came a voice from the floor of the barn.
A vicious shriek overhead and a shaking snort of explosion.
"Gee, that was in the house behind us...."
Outside there was a sickly rough smell in the air that mingled strangely with the perfume of the cool night, musical with the gurgling of the stream through the little valley where their barn was. They crouched in a quarry by the roadside, a straggling, half-naked group, and watched the flashes in the sky northward, where artillery along the lines kept up a continuous hammering drumbeat. Over their heads shells shrieked at two-minute intervals, to explode with a rattling ripping sound in the village on the other side of the valley.
"Damn foolishness," muttered Tom Randolph in his rich Southern voice. "Why don't those damn gunners go to sleep and let us go to sleep?... They must be tired like we are."
A shell burst in a house on the crest of the hill opposite, so that they saw the flash against the starry night sky. In the silence that followed, the moaning shriek of a man came faintly across the valley.