"He is sitting on the top of a rock that is flooded at high tide," some one near me remarked. As the words were spoken, the bather flopped from his place and swam toward us. He was puffing heavily when he grasped the stone side of the jetty and pulled himself up. I then saw that I was mistaken as to his nudity, for he wore the strangest bathing costume that I had ever beheld. It consisted of white cotton trunks about eight inches wide. On one side, embroidered in yellow silk was a vision of the rising sun; skin tight against the other side was a blue pansy. I was fascinated, and watched the man trudge up the winding road that led from the jetty. A ray of the lowering sun flashed on the embroidered pansy rapidly drying against his flanks as he disappeared in the doorway of a cottage. I turned to an old fisherman who was puttering about a sail boat: "It looks Japanezy, that bathing suit," I said. The old man puffed at his pipe: "No; his wife made it," he replied. "He wrote to her that he had learned to swim so she made it and sent it up to him. He had never seen the ocean before he came here. He is from the Midi." "Ah," I replied, "and what did he wear before she sent it?" The old man shrugged his shoulders. "About here, you know, it doesn't much matter about bathing suits. There aren't many folks about." "Who is he?" I asked. "Is he a summer visitor?" "Summer visitor!" the old man gasped. "Summer visitor--why he hates this place and everything in it. He only learned to swim because he had nothing else to do and because he hates it so." "Hates it!" I ejaculated. "Well, why on earth is he here then?" "He's here because he's got to be here," the old chap replied. "He's mobilized here. He's a soldier!" A cigarette that I had just taken from its case, fell from my nerveless fingers into the water and swirled out with the tide. A soldier--a soldier in my retreat. How unspeakably annoying. And in that bathing suit I never would have suspected him at all. The old fisherman explained, while I lugubriously leaned over the jetty and watched that crab puddling about his rock. There were eleven more of them--soldiers, I mean--they all lived in the little cottage near the jetty. They were there to guard the cable between the mainland and the Ile de Bréhat, two miles away. They guarded it the twenty-four hours of the day--those twelve. Every two hours one of them mounted guard where the cable comes up from the sea and solemnly guarded it from German attack. The old fisherman pointed behind me. I turned and there, even as he had explained, I saw a man in the blue coat and red pants of the French territorial army. From the trenches the red pants have gone into the historic past. Nowadays the red pants are only for the territorials.