One of these two was a French petty officer, whose eyes had been shot out, and who, having been left behind in the first retreat toward Paris, had been forgotten, and had stayed behind ever since. The other had likewise been a soldier. He was a Breton peasant. His disability seemed slight enough when he sustained it. A bullet bored across the small of his back, missing the spine. But the bullet bore with it minute fragments of his uniform coat; and so laden with filth had his outer garments become, after weeks and months of service in the field, that, with the fragments of cloth, germs of tetanus had been carried into his flesh also, and lockjaw had followed. Being as strong as a bullock, he had weathered the hideous agonies of his disease; but it left him beset with an affliction like a queer sort of palsy, which affected his limbs, his tongue, and the nerves and muscles of his face. Continually he twitched all over. He moved by a series of spasmodic jerks, and when he sought to speak the sounds he uttered came out from his contorted throat in slobbery, unintelligible gasps and grunts. He was sane enough, but he had the look about him of being an idiot. Besides these two there were three or four very aged, very infirm men on the edge of their dotage; likewise some women, including one masterful, high-tempered old woman and a younger woman who wept continuously, with a monotonous mewing sound, for a husband who was dead in battle and for a fourteen-year-old son who had vanished altogether out of her life, and who, for all she knew, was dead too. The rest were children--young children, and a baby or so. There were no sizable youths whatsoever, and no girls verging on maidenhood, remaining in this place. So this small group was what was left of Courney. Their houses being gone and family ties for the most part wiped out, they consorted together in a rude communal system which a common misery had forced upon them. Theirs was the primitive socialism that the cave dweller may have known in his tribe. As I say, their houses were gone; so they denned in holes where the cellars under the houses had been. Time had been when they fled to the shelter of these holes as the fighting, swinging northward or southward, included Courney in its orbit. Afterward they had contrived patchwork roofage to keep out the worst of the weather; and now they called these underground shelters home, which was an insult to the word home. Once they had had horse meat to eat--the flesh of killed cavalry mounts and wagon teams. Now perforce they were vegetarians, living upon cabbages and beets and potatoes which grew half wild in the old garden patches, and on a coarse bran bread made of a flour ground by hand out of the grain that sprouted in fields where real harvests formerly had grown.