The soldier glanced around the Grande Place, and a gleam of deviltry flashed through his utter exhaustion. “So you come to see the war, huh? Well, don't you wake it now. It's restin'. But if you'll take a chair and set down, I'll have it--called--for--you--in--in--in 'n 'our--or so------” His voice tailed off into sleep once more; he mangled the cigarette, the tobacco mingling with the scraggly beard about his drawn mouth; his head fell forward upon his chest. McDermott stepped past him into the Hôtel Faucon, as the inn had called itself. He found no food, but he found liquor there. “Frinch booze,” said McDermott, getting the cork out of a bottle of brandy and sniffing it; “but booze is booze!” And more booze is more booze, especially upon an empty stomach. It was after the fourth drink that McDermott pulled his chair up to one of the open windows of the inn and sat down, with the brandy beside him. “I'm neglictin' that war I come all this way to see,” said McDermott. The Grande Place, still shaken by the tremendous and unceasing pulsations of battle, far and near, was beginning to wake up. A fresh, or, at least, a fresher, battalion was arriving over the spur line of railroad along which McDermott's mules had been so mistakenly shunted, and was moving eastward through the town to the firing line. The men whom McDermott had seen asleep were rising at the word of command; taking their weapons, falling in, and staggering back to the interminable battle once more. “I dunno,” mused McDermott, as the tired men straggled past, “whether I want to be afther j'inin' that war or not. It makes all thim lads that slapey! I dunno phwat the devil it is, the Frinch booze bein' so close to me, inside, or that war so close to me, outside, but I'm gittin' slapey m'silf.” It was, likely, the brandy. There had not been a great deal of French brandy in McDermott's previous experience, and he did not stint himself. It was somewhere between the ninth and the fifteenth swallows of it that McDermott remarked to himself, rubbing the scar on his head: “I w'u'd jine that war now, if I c'u'd be sure which way it had wint!” And then he slid gently out of his chair and went to sleep on the floor just inside the open window of the Hôtel Fauçon. The war crept closer and took another look at McDermott. As the warm golden afternoon waned, the British troops, fighting like fiends for every inch of ground, exacting a ghastly toll of lives from the Germans, were forced back into the eastern outskirts of the town. There, with rifle and machine gun, from walls, trees, courtyards, roofs and ruins, they held the advancing Germans for an hour. But they were pushed back again, doggedly establishing themselves in the houses of the Grande Place. Neither British nor Germans were dropping shells into that village now, each side fearful of damaging its own men.