Then the sergeant went out of the barn, cursing the straw on his spurs, and I lit a match and brushed down my clothes and ran off to the square.  It was not yet two in the morning.

The gunners were drawn up in a double line, and we reserve drivers stood separate (there were only a dozen of us), and when they formed fours we were at the tail.  There was a lieutenant with us and a sergeant, also two bombardiers—­all mounted; and so we went off, keeping step till we were out of the town, and then marching as we chose and thanking God for the change.  For it is no easy matter for drivers to march with gunners; their swords impede them, and though the French drivers have not the ridiculous top-boots that theatricalise other armies, yet even their simple boots are not well suited for the road.

This custom of sending forward reserve drivers on foot, in rotation, has a fine name to it.  It is called “Haut-le-pied,” “High-the-foot,” and must therefore be old.

A little way out of the town we had leave to sing, and we began, all together, one of those long and charming songs with which the French soldiery make-believe to forget the tedium of the road and the hardship of arms.

Now, if a man desired to answer once and for all those pedants who refuse to understand the nature of military training (both those who make a silly theatre-show of it and those who make it hideous and diabolical), there could be no better way than to let him hear the songs of soldiers.  In the French service, at least, these songs are a whole expression of the barrack-room; its extreme coarseness, its steady and perpetual humour, its hatred of the hard conditions of discipline; and also these songs continually portray the distant but delightful picture of things—­I mean of things rare and far off—­which must lie at the back of men’s minds when they have much work to do with their hands and much living in the open air and no women to pour out their wine.

Moreover, these songs have another excellent quality.  They show all through that splendid unconsciousness of the soldier, that inability in him to see himself from without, or to pose as civilians always think and say he poses.

We sang that morning first, the chief and oldest of the songs.  It dates from the Flemish wars of Louis XIV, and is called “Aupres de ma Blonde.”  Every one knows the tune.  Then we sang “The Song of the Miller,” and then many other songs, each longer than the last.  For these songs, like other lyrics, have it for an object to string out as many verses as possible in order to kill the endless straight roads and the weariness.