The little maid who served them moved about noiselessly.  Her dull eyes never seemed to look; yet she saw when it was time to bring the heavy soup tureen, and when it was time to take it away.  Madame Joubert had found that Claude liked his potatoes with his meat—­when there was meat—­and not in a course by themselves.  She had each time to tell the little girl to go and fetch them.  This the child did with manifest reluctance,—­sullenly, as if she were being forced to do something wrong.  She was a very strange little creature, altogether.  As the two soldiers left the table and started for the camp, Claude reached down into the tool house and took up one of the kittens, holding it out in the light to see it blink its eyes.  The little girl, just coming out of the kitchen, uttered a shrill scream, a really terrible scream, and squatted down, covering her face with her hands.  Madame Joubert came out to chide her.

“What is the matter with that child?” Claude asked as they hurried out of the gate.  “Do you suppose she was hurt, or abused in some way?”

“Terrorized.  She often screams like that at night.  Haven’t you heard her?  They have to go and wake her, to stop it.  She doesn’t speak any French; only Walloon.  And she can’t or won’t learn, so they can’t tell what goes on in her poor little head.”

In the two weeks of intensive training that followed, Claude marvelled at Gerhardt’s spirit and endurance.  The muscular strain of mimic trench operations was more of a tax on him than on any of the other officers.  He was as tall as Claude, but he weighed only a hundred and forty-six pounds, and he had not been roughly bred like most of the others.  When his fellow officers learned that he was a violinist by profession, that he could have had a soft job as interpreter or as an organizer of camp entertainments, they no longer resented his reserve or his occasional superciliousness.  They respected a man who could have wriggled out and didn’t.

VII

On the march at last; through a brilliant August day Colonel Scott’s battalion was streaming along one of the dusty, well-worn roads east of the Somme, their railway base well behind them.  The way led through rolling country; fields, hills, woods, little villages shattered but still habitable, where the people came out to watch the soldiers go by.

The Americans went through every village in march step, colours flying, the band playing, “to show that the morale was high,” as the officers said.  Claude trudged on the outside of the column,—­now at the front of his company, now at the rear,—­wearing a stoical countenance, afraid of betraying his satisfaction in the men, the weather, the country.

They were bound for the big show, and on every hand were reassuring signs:  long lines of gaunt, dead trees, charred and torn; big holes gashed out in fields and hillsides, already half concealed by new undergrowth; winding depressions in the earth, bodies of wrecked motor-trucks and automobiles lying along the road, and everywhere endless straggling lines of rusty barbed-wire, that seemed to have been put there by chance,—­with no purpose at all.