I thought of the shells I had seen bursting over the fort.

“Do you put salt in chocolate?” he asked professionally.

“Not as a rule,” I replied.

“It improves it,” he pursued, as if he were revealing a confidential dogma.  “The Boche bread is bad, very bad, much worse than a year ago.  Full of crumbles and lumps.  Degoutant!”

The ambulance rolled up to the evacuation station, and my pastry cook alighted.

“When the war is over, come to my shop,” he whispered benevolently, “and you shall have some tartes aux pommes a la mode de Saint-Denis with my wife and me.”

“With fresh cream?” I asked.

“Of course,” he replied seriously.

I accepted gratefully, and the good old soul gave me his address.

In the afternoon a sergeant rode with me.  He was somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty, thick-set of body, with black hair and the tanned and ruddy complexion of outdoor folk.  The high collar of a dark-blue sweater rose over his great coat and circled a muscular throat; his gray socks were pulled country-wise outside of the legs of his blue trousers.  He had an honest, pleasant face; there was a certain simple, wholesome quality about the man.  In the piping times of peace, he was a cultivateur in the Valois, working his own little farm; he was married and had two little boys.  At Douaumont, a fragment of a shell had torn open his left hand.

“The Boches are not going to get through up there?”

“Not now.  As long as we hold the heights, Verdun is safe.”  His simple French, innocent of argot, had a good country twang.  “But oh, the people killed!  Comme il y a des gens tues!” He pronounced the final s of the word gens in the manner of the Valois.

“Ca s’accroche aux arbres,” he continued.

The vagueness of the ca had a dreadful quality in it that made you see trees and mangled bodies.  “We had to hold the crest of Douaumont under a terrible fire, and clear the craters on the slope when the Germans tried to fortify them.  Our ‘seventy-fives’ dropped shells into the big craters as I would drop stones into a pond.  Pauvres gens!”

The phrase had an earth-wide sympathy in it, a feeling that the translation “poor folks” does not render.  He had taken part in a strange incident.  There had been a terrible corps-a-corps in one of the craters which had culminated in a victory for the French; but the lieutenant of his company had left a kinsman behind with the dead and wounded.  Two nights later, the officer and the sergeant crawled down the dreadful slope to the crater where the combat had taken place, in the hope of finding the wounded man.  They could hear faint cries and moans from the crater before they got to it.  The light of a pocket flash-lamp showed them a mass of dead and wounded on the floor of the crater—­“un tas de mourants et de cadavres,” as he expressed it.

After a short search, they found the man for whom they were looking; he was still alive but unconscious.  They were dragging him out when a German, hideously wounded, begged them to kill him.