And so she stayed, selling the three staples of the French front, Camembert cheese, Norwegian sardines, and cakes of chocolate.  But Montauville was far from safe.  It was there that I first saw a man killed.  I had been talking to a sentry, a small young fellow of twenty-one or two, with yellow hair and gray-blue eyes full of weariness.  He complained of a touch of jaundice, and wished heartily that the whole affaire—­meaning the war in general—­was finished.  He was very anxious to know if the Americans thought the Boches were going to win.  Some vague idea of winning the war just to get even with the Boches seemed to be in his mind.  I assured him that American opinion was optimistic in regard to the chances of the Allies, and strolled away.  Hardly had I gone ten feet, when a “seventy-seven” shell, arriving without warning, went Zip-bang, and, turning to crouch to the wall, I saw the sentry crumple up in the mud.  It was as if he were a rubber effigy of a man blown up with air, and some one had suddenly ripped the envelope.  His rifle fell from him, and he, bending from the waist, leaned face down into the mud.  I was the first to get to him.  The young, discontented face was full of the gray street mud, there was mud in the hollows of the eyes, in the mouth, in the fluffy mustache.  A chunk of the shell had ripped open the left breast to the heart.  Down his sleeve, as down a pipe, flowed a hasty drop, drop, drop of blood that mixed with the mire.

Several times a day, at stated hours, the numbers of German missiles that had fallen into the trenches of the Bois-le-Pretre, together with French answers to them, would be telephoned to headquarters.  The soldier in charge of the telephone was an instructor in Latin in a French provincial university, a tall, stoop- shouldered man, with an indefinite, benevolent smile curiously framed on thin lips.  Probably very much of a scholar by training and feeling, he had accepted his military destiny, and was as much a poilu as anybody.  During his leisure hours he was busy writing a “Comparison of the Campaign on the Marne and the Aisne with Caesar’s battles against the Belgian Confederacy.”  He had a paper edition of the Gallic Wars which he carried round with him.  One day he explained his thesis to me.  He drew a plan with a green pencil on a piece of paper.

“See, mon ami,” he exclaimed, “here is the Aisne, Caesar’s Axona; here is Berry-au-Bac; here was Caesar, here were the invaders, here was General French, here Foch, here Von Kluck.  Curious, isn’t it—­two thousand years afterward?” His eyes for an instant filled with dreamy perplexity.  A little while later I would hear him mechanically telephoning.  “Poste A—­five ‘seventy-seven’ shells, six mines, twelve trench shells; answer—­ten ‘seventy-five’ shells, eight mines, eighteen trench shells; Poste B—­two ‘seventy-seven’ shells, one mine, six grenades; answer—­fifteen ‘seventy-five’ shells; Poste C—­one ’two hundred and ten’ shell, fifty mines; answer—­sixty mines; Poste D—­”