Meanwhile the whole French populace has called, singly or in crowds, in order to see just what is going on. As for the children, I am sure they must have declared a school holiday in honor of us. The whole concern is evidently a bit puzzling to the French mind; but they have solved the riddle by terming the hut a “_coopératif_,” and so I let it rest. But you will be wondering how _le diable_ is contriving to live with _le bon Dieu_. Monsieur le Curé is quite old. There is something stern and something tragic in his face, with all his urbane graciousness. He is a refugee from the devastated area and like myself a lodger in the house, whose owners have fled this zone of armies. Monsieur le Curé was a captive for six months with the Germans and the desolate confinement wrought a little on his mind; “At times he is absent,” says Madame the Caretaker. This morning I stopped and chatted with him at his door downstairs, he called me in to show me “a souvenir of his captivity,” a little dirty-white tin basin out of which as prisoner he ate. “I learned to smoke then,” he told me. “There was nothing to do the whole day long but sit and smoke and wait for the clock to strike.” Tonight I am going to take him a little gift of American tobacco. I am planning a house-warming with which to formally open the hut. Mauvages, November 6. We didn’t have that house-warming. Even as we were finishing the hut all hands came down with the flu. Curiously enough it hit the camp all in a heap after dinner. Thirty per cent of the boys, the two officers, the building detail and myself were all laid low between one and six o’clock. Fortunately it was the lightest sort of an epidemic, a mere _soupçon_ as it were, in every case. I merely retired to my bed for a day and a half and refused to eat. On the third day, which was yesterday, I crawled back to the canteen. It was a case of pipe all hands on deck and stand to the counter. Two companies of engineers had arrived in the night. They were back from an advanced station just behind the lines and they were starved for chocolate and cigarettes. Two months ago they left Abainville, green troops, just over, now they are seasoned veterans, in proof of which they carry souvenirs salvaged from German dugouts. I heard all about these souvenirs, as I was taking breakfast, from the lips of an excited Neighbor Woman. From the list of unwarlike trophies which she rattled off I gleaned umbrellas and a wall-clock; but the best was reserved for me when I reached the canteen. One of the boys had met one of these same engineers toiling up the hill from the railroad with a large upholstered armchair on his back. “You can’t imagine,” he complacently replied to his gaping questioners, “how nice it is, at the end of a hard day’s work, to be able to sit down and smoke one’s pipe in real comfort.”