Roaring with heavy wheels, grinding with gears, throbbing with motors, camion after camion went by, slowly, stridently. The men packed into the camions had broken through the canvas covers and leaned out, waving their arms and shouting. "Oh, the poor children," said the old woman, wringing her hands, her voice lost in the roar and the shouting. "They should not destroy property that way," said the schoolmaster.... "Last year it was dreadful. There were mutinies." Martin sat, his chair tilted back, his hands trembling, staring with compressed lips at the men who jolted by on the strident, throbbing camions. A word formed in his mind: tumbrils. In some trucks the men were drunk and singing, waving their bidons in the air, shouting at people along the road, crying out all sorts of things: "Get to the front!" "Into the trenches with them!" "Down with the war!" In others they sat quiet, faces corpse-like with dust. Through the gap in the trellis Martin stared at them, noting intelligent faces, beautiful faces, faces brutally gay, miserable faces like those of sobbing drunkards. At last the convoy passed and the dust settled again on the rutted road. "Oh, the poor children!" said the old woman. "They know they are going to death." They tried to hide their agitation. The schoolmaster poured out more wine. "Yes," said Martin, "there are fine orchards on the hills round here." "You should be here when the plums are ripe," said the schoolmaster. A tall bearded man, covered with dust to the eyelashes, in the uniform of a commandant, stepped into the garden. "My dear friends!" He shook hands with the schoolmaster and the old woman and saluted the two Americans. "I could not pass without stopping a moment. We are going up to an attack. We have the honour to take the lead." "You will have a glass of wine, won't you?" "With great pleasure." "Julie, fetch a bottle, you know which.... How is the morale?" "Perfect." "I thought they looked a little discontented." "No.... It's always like that.... They were yelling at some gendarmes. If they strung up a couple it would serve them right, dirty beasts." "You soldiers are all one against the gendarmes." "Yes. We fight the enemy but we hate the gendarmes." The commandant rubbed his hands, drank his wine and laughed. "Hah! There's the next convoy. I must go." "Good luck." The commandant shrugged his shoulders, clicked his heels together at the garden gate, saluted, smiling, and was gone. Again the village street was full of the grinding roar and throb of camions, full of a frenzy of wheels and drunken shouting. "Give us a drink, you." "We're the train de luxe, we are." "Down with the war!" And the old grey woman wrung her hands and said: "Oh, the poor children, they know they are going to death!" CHAPTER IV Martin, rolled up in his bedroll on the floor of the empty hayloft, woke with a start.