The next night the soldiers began teaching the girls to dance the “Pas Seul” and the “Fausse Trot.”  They had found an old violin in the town; and Oscar, the Swede, scraped away on it.  They danced every evening.  Claude saw that a good deal was going on, and he lectured his men at parade.  But he realized that he might as well scold at the sparrows.  Here was a village with several hundred women, and only the grandmothers had husbands.  All the men were in the army; hadn’t even been home on leave since the Germans first took the place.  The girls had been shut up for four years with young men who incessantly coveted them, and whom they must constantly outwit.  The situation had been intolerable—­and prolonged.  The Americans found themselves in the position of Adam in the garden.

“Did you know, sir,” said Bert Fuller breathlessly as he overtook Claude in the street after parade, “that these lovely girls had to go out in the fields and work, raising things for those dirty pigs to eat?  Yes, sir, had to work in the fields, under German sentinels; marched out in the morning and back at night like convicts!  It’s sure up to us to give them a good time now.”

One couldn’t walk out of an evening without meeting loitering couples in the dusky streets and lanes.  The boys had lost all their bashfulness about trying to speak French.  They declared they could get along in France with three verbs, and all, happily, in the first conjugation:  manger, aimer, payer,—­quite enough!  They called Beaufort “our town,” and they were called “our Americans.”  They were going to come back after the war, and marry the girls, and put in waterworks!

“Chez-moi, sir!” Bill Gates called to Claude, saluting with a bloody hand, as he stood skinning rabbits before the door of his billet.  “Bunny casualties are heavy in town this week!”

“You know, Wheeler,” David remarked one morning as they were shaving, “I think Maxey would come back here on one leg if he knew about these excursions into the forest after mushrooms.”

“Maybe.”

“Aren’t you going to put a stop to them?”

“Not I!” Claude jerked, setting the corners of his mouth grimly.  “If the girls, or their people, make complaint to me, I’ll interfere.  Not otherwise.  I’ve thought the matter over.”

“Oh, the girls—­” David laughed softly.  “Well, it’s something to acquire a taste for mushrooms.  They don’t get them at home, do they?”

When, after eight days, the Americans had orders to march, there was mourning in every house.  On their last night in town, the officers received pressing invitations to the dance in the square.  Claude went for a few moments, and looked on.  David was dancing every dance, but Hicks was nowhere to be seen.  The poor fellow had been out of everything.  Claude went over to the church to see whether he might be moping in the graveyard.

There, as he walked about, Claude stopped to look at a grave that stood off by itself, under a privet hedge, with withered leaves and a little French flag on it.  The old woman with whom they stayed had told them the story of this grave.