This particular cable sentry was also from the Midi, my fisherman explained. He too disliked the sea. He sat there and stared moodily into the sun that was just in the act of gloriously descending into the water. A last ray caught the steel bayonet of the Lebel rifle lying across his knees. I left the jetty and walked up the winding road to the village. I went to the single store to buy tobacco and to hear the talk of the people. There were no newspapers, I thought, so their talk could not be about the war. Also there I would avoid the sight of the soldiers, because the store had liquor on its list of commodities. It is forbidden to soldiers to enter such places except at certain hours. A fresh-faced Breton girl served out the tobacco. Cigars at two cents each were the most expensive tobacco purchase in the shop. I purchased a dozen and immediately became a celebrity and a millionaire. We talked. I asked her about the countryside, about the people and about the wonderful lace coiffures of the peasant women. She told me how the women of one hamlet wear an entirely different "coif" from those even of the neighboring farms and that throughout Brittany there are hundreds of different styles. Then I asked her about the men folks, the few who work in the fields and the great majority who go off in the boats to Iceland in the spring and come back ten months later--those who ever do come back at all. Then quite naturally we talked about the war. For she explained that to her people the war was not so terrible as the times of peace. Then it was impossible to get letters from a fishing schooner off the Iceland banks--now it was quite easy to get letters from the trenches every few days. The men suffered far greater losses from the perils of the northern ocean than since they were all mobilized to fight the Germans. Some were killed--that was natural enough--but not half so many as the number who just sailed out and disappeared. I was beginning to feel that perhaps the war was a benefit to this part of the world. An old woman entered the store to buy tobacco. She was bent and withered and her hand trembled as she drew the few coppers from her purse. Her voice was high and quavery when she spoke to the girl. She said that her son had just been wounded near Verdun. His condition was desperate, but they were bringing him home--to her--to die on the old Brittany farm, on the hillside overlooking the sea. "Ah, la guerre," she murmured, "c'est terrible." She explained that her other boys had been lost on a fishing schooner five years ago. She had tried to keep this one--had wanted him so much and tried so hard. But if she could see him again it would be better. She sighed and tucked purse and tobacco under her apron and clattered out on her heavy wooden sabots--her head bowed under her years and her woe. "C'est pour la patrie," she murmured as she passed through the door.