The little group to which I was most attached, and for whose hospitality and friendly greeting I shall always be a debtor, consisted of Belin, a railroad clerk; Bonnefon, a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; Magne, a village schoolmaster in the Dauphine; and Gretry, proprietor of a butcher’s shop in the Latin Quarter of Paris.  Belin and Magne had violins which they left in the care of a cafe-keeper in the village, and used to play on them just before dinner.  The dinner was served in the house of the village woman who prepared the food of these four, for sous-officiers are entitled to eat by themselves if they can find any one kind enough to look after the cooking.  If they can’t, then they have to rely entirely on the substantial but hardly delicious cuisine of their regimental cuistot.  However, at this village, Madame Brun, the widow of the local carpenter, had offered to take the popotte, as the French term an officer’s mess.  We ate in a room half parlor, half bedchamber, decorated exclusively with holy pictures.  This was a good specimen menu—­bread, vermicelli soup, apple fritters, potato salad, boiled beef, red wine, and coffee.  Of this dinner, the Government furnished the potatoes, the bread, the meat, the coffee, the wine, and the condiments; private purses paid for the fritters, the vermicelli, and the bits of onion in the salad.  Standing round their barns the private soldiers were having a tasty stew of meat and potatoes cooked by the field kitchen, bread, and a cupful of boiled lentils (known in the army as “edible bedbugs"), all washed down with the army pinard, or red wine.

This village in which the troops were lodged revealed in an interesting way the course of French history.  Across the river on a rise was a cross commemorating the victory of the Emperor Jo vin over the invading Germans in 371, and sunken in the bed of the Moselle were still seen lengths of Roman dikes.  The heart of the village, however, was the corpse of a fourteenth-century castle which Richelieu had dismantled in 1630.  Its destiny had been a curious one.  Dismantled by Richelieu, sacked in the French Revolution, it had finally become a kind of gigantic mediaeval apartment house for the peasants of the region.  The salle d’honneur was cut up into little rooms, the room of the seigneur became a haymow, and the cellars of the towers were used to store potatoes in.  About twenty little chimneys rose over the old, dilapidated battlements.  A haymow in this castle was the most picturesque thing I ever saw in a cantonment.  It was the wreck of a lofty and noble fifteenth-century room, the ceiling, still a rich red brown, was supported on beautiful square beams, and a cross-barred window of the Renaissance, of which only the stonework remained, commanded a fine view over the river.  The walls of the room were of stone, whitewashed years before, and the floor was an ordinary barn floor made of common planks and covered with a foot of new, clean hay.  In the center of the southern wall was a Gothic fireplace, still black and ashy within.  On the corners of this mantel hung clusters of canteens, guns were stacked by it, and a blue overcoat was rolled up at its base.  An old man, the proprietor of the loft, followed us up, made signs that he was completely deaf, and traced in the dust on the floor the date, 1470.