Maréchal des logis

And you? I had a notion that he'd do that, so I changed the specification.

thus spoke the staff and so it is among the junior commands down to the semi-isolated posts where boy napoleons live on their own through unbelievable adventures they are inventive young devils these veterans of twenty-one possessed of the single ideal to kill which they follow with men as single-minded as themselves battlefield tactics do not exist when a whole nation goes to ground there can be none of the victories of the old bookish days but there is always the killing the well-schemed smashing of a full trench the brushing out and the mowing down of its occupants the unsuspicious battalion far in the rear located after two nights extreme risk alone among rubbish of masonry and wiped out as it eats or washes itself and more rarely the body-to-body encounter with animals removed from the protection of their machinery when the bayonets get their chance the boche does not at all like meeting men whose womenfolk he has dishonoured or mutilated or used as protection against bullets it is not that these men are angry or violent they do not waste time in that way they kill him the business of war the french are less reticent than we about atrocities committed by the boche because those atrocities form part of their lives they are not tucked away in reports of commissions and vaguely referred to as too awful later on perhaps we shall be unreserved in our turn but they do not talk of them with any babbling heat or bleat or make funny little appeals to a public opinion that like the boche has gone underground it occurs to me that this must be because every frenchman has his place and his chance direct or indirect to diminish the number of boches still alive whether he lies out in a sandwich of damp earth or sweats the big guns up the crests behind the trees or brings the fat loaded barges into the very heart of the city where the shell wagons wait or spends his last crippled years at the harvest he is doing his work to that end if he's a civilian he may as he does say things about his government which after all is very like other popular governments a lifetime spent in watching how the cat jumps does not make lion tamers but there is very little human rubbish knocking about france to hinder work or darken counsel above all there is a thing called the honour of civilisation to which france is attached the meanest man feels that he in his place is permitted to help uphold it and i think bears himself therefore with new dignity a contrast in types this is written in a garden of smooth turf under a copper beech beside a glassy mill-stream where soldiers of alpine regiments are writing letters home while the guns shout up and down the narrow valleys a great wolfhound who considers himself in charge of the old-fashioned farmhouse cannot understand why his master aged six should be sitting on the knees of the marechal des logis the iron man who drives the big car But you are French, little one, says the giant, with a yearning arm round the child.

Yes, very slowly mouthing the French words, I can't speak French, but I am French.

The small face disappears in the big beard.