I had the Colonel’s dressing-room--he had attained the grade of Colonel before Verdun, so Pierre told me--and Madame Chéri came in while I was there to see that it was properly arranged for me. Over his iron bedstead (the Germans had taken the woollen mattress, so that it had been replaced by bags of straw) was his portrait as a lieutenant of artillery, as he had been at the time of his marriage. He was a handsome fellow, rather like Hélène, with her delicate profile and brown eyes, though more like, said Madame Chéri, their eldest boy Edouard. “Where is he?” I asked, and that was the only time I saw Madame Chéri break down, utterly. She began to tell me that Edouard had been taken away by the Germans among all the able-bodied men and boys who were sent away from Lille for digging trenches behind the lines, in Easter of ’16, and that he had gone bravely, with his little pack of clothes over his shoulder, saying, “It is nothing, maman. My Father taught me the word _courage_. In a little while we shall win, and I shall be back. Courage, courage!” Madame Chéri repeated her son’s words proudly, so that I seemed to see the boy with that pack on his shoulder, and a smile on his face. Then suddenly she wept bitterly, wildly, her body shaken with a kind of ague, while she sat on the iron bedstead with her face in her hands. I repeated the boy’s words. “Courage, courage, madame!” Proudly she wailed out in broken sentences: “He was such a child!... He caught cold so easily!... He was so delicate!... He needed mother-love so much!... For two years no word has come from him!” In a little while she controlled herself and begged me to excuse her. We went down together to the dining-room, where the children were playing, and Hélène was reading; and she insisted upon my drinking a glass of wine from the store which she had kept hidden from the Germans in a pit which Edouard had dug in the garden, in the first days of the occupation. The children were delighted with that trick and roared with laughter. Hélène, with a curl of her lip, spoke bitterly. “The Boche is a stupid animal. One can dupe him easily.” “Not always easily,” said Madame Chéri. She opened a secret cupboard behind a bookcase standing against the panelled wall. “I hid all my brass and copper here. A German police officer came and said, ‘Have you hidden any copper, madame?’ I said, ‘There is nothing hidden.’ ‘Do you swear it?’ he asked. ‘I swear it,’ I answered very haughtily. He went straight to the bookcase, pushed it on one side, tapped the wall, and opened the secret cupboard, which was stuffed full of brass and copper. ‘You are a liar, madame,’ he said, ‘like all Frenchwomen.’ ‘And you are an insolent pig, like all Germans,’ I remarked. That cost me a fine of ten thousand francs.”