There was cheese too.  And at the end of the meal Colonel Jacques, with great empressement, laid before me a cake of sweet chocolate.

I had to be shown the way to use the bully beef.  One of the hard flat biscuits was split open, spread with butter and then with the beef in a deep layer.  It was quite good, but what with excitement and fatigue I was not hungry.  Everybody ate; everybody talked; and, after asking my permission, everybody smoked.  I sat near the stove and dried my steaming boots.

Afterward I remembered that with all the conversation there was very little noise.  Our voices were subdued.  Probably we might have cheered in that closed and barricaded house without danger.  But the sense of the nearness of the enemy was over us all, and the business of war was not forgotten.  There were men who came, took orders and went away.  There were maps on the walls and weapons in every corner.  Even the sacking that covered the windows bespoke caution and danger.

Here it was too near the front for the usual peasant family huddled round its stove in the kitchen, and looking with resignation on these strange occupants of their house.  The humble farm buildings outside were destroyed.

I looked round the room; a picture or two still hung on the walls, and a crucifix.  There is always a crucifix in these houses.  There was a carbine just beneath this one.

Inside of one of the picture frames one of the Colonel’s medals had been placed, as if for safety.

Colonel Jacques sat at the head of the table and beamed at us all.  He has behind him many years of military service.  He has been decorated again and again for bravery.  But, perhaps, when this war is over and he has time to look back he will smile over that night supper with the first woman he had seen for months, under the rumble of his own and the German batteries.

It was time to go to the advance trenches.  But before we left one of the officers who had accompanied me rose and took a folded paper from a pocket of his tunic.  He was smiling.

“I shall read,” he said, “a little tribute from one of Colonel Jacques’ soldiers to him.”

So we listened.  Colonel Jacques sat and smiled; but he is a modest man, and his fingers were beating a nervous tattoo on the table.  The young officer stood and read, glancing up now and then to smile at his chief’s embarrassment.  The wind howled outside, setting the sacks at the windows to vibrating.

This is a part of the poem: 

III

“Comme chef nous avons l’homme a la hauteur
Un homme aime et adore de tous
L’Colonel Jacques; de lui les hommes sont fous
En lui nous voyons l’embleme de l’honneur. 
Des compagnes il en a des tas:  En Afrique
Haecht et Dixmude, Ramsdonck et Sart-Tilmau
Et toujours premier et toujours en avant
Toujours en tet’ de son beau regiment,
Toujours railleur
Chef au grand coeur.