Covered With Mud and Glory: A Machine Gun Company in Action ("Ma Mitrailleuse"). Georges Lafond
you found a place for your horse?” he asked.
“Not yet, Lieutenant. I’ve just come.”
I pointed out Kiki through the door to the courtyard where he waited, stoically and calmly, under the snow. Perhaps he remembered the times not long ago that he waited for hours at the doors of the ranch under more wintry winds. Perhaps he imagined that he was still waiting for the rough Canadian pioneer who tarried for long discussions about business, warming himself the while with whiskey. At any rate Kiki waited stoically and quietly. He scarcely condescended to welcome us by a glance when I presented him to the lieutenant, who stroked his head.
“This is Kiki, Lieutenant. I don’t know his real name, for his record bore only his number, but that fits him and he seems to like it. He is a Canadian, seven years old, thin but strong, very gentle and a good jumper.”
“He’s pretty. Come along. We’ll put him in with mine. They’ll get along all right together.”
So I took Kiki by the bridle and the lieutenant and I went along talking, until we reached an improvised stable where the officer’s horse and his groom were quartered.
Zèbre was a great brown horse, with a huge, calm face. Everything here certainly gives an impression of calmness.
I took leave of the officer for the time being and returned to the quartermaster’s, where a steaming soup and scalding coffee were waiting for me. It was nearly noon and I had eaten nothing hot for the last forty-eight hours. It was four above zero and it was time.
CHAPTER II
THE QUARTERMASTER’S BILLETS
I was seated under a shed of loose boards in the courtyard of Cantonment No. 77, and just tasting some excellent macaroni which the cook had warmed up for me, when Dedouche, the orderly, came to find me.
“Say, Sergeant,” he asked, “are you the intelligence officer?”
The title of “sergeant” sounds strange in the ears of a cavalryman, and I felt a little hurt in my esprit de corps; but I at once answered Dedouche’s summons, for the orderly, in spite of being at the beck and call of everyone, enjoys a certain prestige. He has a real importance, small though it be, but an importance which carries weight when he gives his opinion in the discussions of the “little staff” of the company.
This staff is the household of the quartermaster’s billets. With some slight differences it is in general composed of the quartermaster-sergeant, lacking a sergeant-major which companies of machine guns rarely have, a quartermaster-corporal, an adjutant and a mess corporal. I was admitted to the honor of taking part in the discussions of the staff on account of the detached and unusual character of my duties.
But Dedouche was summoning me. I turned and observed him leisurely. Dedouche is an excellent fellow. Without even knowing him one would guess it at first glance. He is good-natured, never in a hurry, no matter how urgent his errand, and indifferent alike to blows and invectives. He smiles under torrents of abuse and threats of the most terrible punishments, and does his duty as man of all work silently. In a word, he possesses all the qualities inherent in his duty. He is tall and spare; his face is beardless and sanctimonious; his eyes smile, but they look far away under his great round glasses with their large rims. All in all Dedouche looks like a lay brother. To complete the illusion, when he talks he has a habit of thrusting his hands into the large sleeves of his jacket and lowering his head to look over his spectacles. In civil life Dedouche was an assistant in a pharmacy in one of the large provincial cities. He knows the art of making up learned formulae. His long slim fingers manage the most fragile things with skill, and his grave voice is accustomed to the mezzotints of the laboratory.
“Yes,” I answered at last, “it is I.”
“The lieutenant wants you.”
I gulped down my plate of macaroni in two mouthfuls, swallowed the coffee which the cook, already attentive to my wants, held out to me, and followed Dedouche the two hundred yards which separated us from the billets.
Two hundred yards is nothing, and yet it is a world. In less time than it takes to tell it I learned a mass of things from Dedouche.
First, what part of the country we are from. The … first Colonials was organized in the South. So, in the hope of finding in each newcomer another “countryman,” Dedouche asked the new arrival at once,
“What part of the country are you from?”
He had some doubt about my reply. A Hussar of a regiment with an unknown number, who had given little opportunity to study his accent, might be a man from the North or the East. “One never knows with these cavalrymen,” he seemed to say, “they’re so uncertain.” So he changed the form and varied his traditional question somewhat,
“You’re not from the South, by chance, Sergeant?”
At this repetition of his offense about my title, I thought that I ought to slip in a discreet observation, so I said,
“In the cavalry, my friend, the sergeant is called ‘maréchal des logis.’ ” And then having satisfied my slightly offended esprit de corps, I replied, “Yes, mon vieux, I am from the South, in fact from the Mediterranean, from L’Herault.”
“How things happen!” exclaimed Dedouche. “I’m from Le Clapas.”
Le Clapas is the nickname given to Montpellier in the territory. And at that there came all at once a bewildering flow of words. Dedouche began to tell me, mixing it all up in an incredible confusion, about his birthplace, his adventures, his former regular occupation, in the depths of a pharmacy in a small street under the shadow of the University, his transfer from the auxiliary to active service, his wound in Champagne. All this was interspersed with frequent exclamations and repetitions, “Say, tell me, Maréchal, will this war ever be over?” and then regrets for his home land, “Say, tell me, Logis, wouldn’t it be better down there in the good sun?”
In these different attempts to get nearer to the term “maréchal de logis,” I observed Dedouche’s obvious good will, but what interested me most was a little advance knowledge about the company.
So Dedouche sketched in a few words a picture of it, which was absolutely accurate, as I was able to appreciate later.
“The lieutenant is a very chic type. No one would think to look at him that he is from the South, too. He appears cold and hard, like that, but it’s not natural; he puts it on. He’s good-hearted at bottom. He’s a Basque and isn’t afraid of anything. You ought to have seen him in Champagne at Massiges. Oh, and then we have besides his fellow countryman, Sub-Lieutenant Delpos, a blond. He’s not here now; he’s down at Morcourt with the echelon. He’s a type too, not stuck-up, but he’s agreeable and good-humored.
“Oh, those in the billets,” Dedouche sketched with a vague wave of the hand, as if to say something like this: “They’re of no importance; they’re brothers, friends, and not worth talking about.” Perhaps his gesture meant something else, but that’s what I thought it meant.
And as if he were responding to my implied question, he went on:
“—there is only the drummer who’s from the South, too; he’s what they call the ‘quartermaster corporal,’ I don’t know why. He’s a good fellow, but he does not talk. At least he only talks rarely, and he’s from Marseilles, too; no one would think it to see him. He makes me mad most of the time.
“Oh, the rest! The corporal of infantry is from Paris. I don’t know him. He only came five or six days ago. He hasn’t told us anything yet; he only sings. And what songs! Good God, they’re enough to make one blush!
“The juteux—the adjutant,” interrupted Dedouche,