After the meal I went over to the tent of a friend.  He was sitting by a flickering candle in moody silence.  I asked him to come with me to the village.  He put on his great-coat and we walked along the duckboards on to the road.  It was intensely dark and we were conscious of the silent fall of snow.

“What sort of a day did you have?” I asked.

“Undiluted misery.  We marched to the quarry and when we got there we found there was nothing to do, because the train hadn’t turned up.  So we waited in the wind and snow, just walking up and down, stamping with our feet and trying to get warm.  Lieutenant Rowlatt was in charge of us.  He wouldn’t let us leave the quarry or go into an estaminet.  And he only gave us half an hour for dinner.  Of course he spent most of the time in an estaminet himself, eating eggs and chips and flirting with the girl ...  I couldn’t keep warm and there was no shelter anywhere.  It was like doing an eight-hour guard.”

All the windows in the streets of the village were shuttered, but the light shone through cracks and chinks—­a promise of warmth within that cheered us a little.

We entered an estaminet.  It was crowded.  Soldiers were standing round the walls waiting for vacant seats.  We went to another place, but that too was crowded.  Indeed, they were all crowded.  Nevertheless, it was better to stand in the warmth than to walk about stiff-limbed in the slush and falling snow.  We went into the next estaminet we came to.  We entered the main room.  An oil lamp was hanging from the ceiling.  In the middle there was a long table and soldiers were seated round it, squeezed tightly together, eating eggs and chips and drinking wine or coffee.  We leaned up against the wall with a number of others and waited our turn.  The air was hot and moist and smelt of stale tobacco, burning fat, and steaming clothes.  There was a glowing stove at one end of the room.  It looked like a red-hot spherical urn on a low black pedestal.  A big bowl of liquid fat was seething on the fire.  A woman with flaming cheeks was throwing handfuls of sliced potatoes into it while she held a saucepan in which a number of eggs were spluttering.  The heat was becoming intolerable and we edged away from the stove.  We waited patiently.  More and more men came in until there was no standing room left.  The conversation was boisterous and vulgar, much of it at the expense of the woman, who laughed frequently and pretended to feel shocked and called the soldiers “Naughty boyss.”  A few men rose from the table from time to time and at last our turn came, so that we were able to sit down.  We ordered eggs and chips and vin blanc, but had to wait a long time before we got them.  I rested my head on my hand and struggled hard with sleep.  At last the woman brought us the things we had ordered and we ate and drank in silence.  We would have been glad to sit and doze in this warm place in spite of the smell and noise, but when we had finished we felt obliged to get up and make room for others.