Page:Armistice Day.djvu/376

354 water,—was nearly irresistible. To see that it did not become altogether irresistible was the business of the second lieutenant in the rear of the line.

My own guide, Pierre Bonnat, was an Auvergnat, tallish for a Frenchman,—dark-haired, with a high sugar-loaf forehead, melancholy, half-retreating eyes, and a bow-shaped mustache thin enough not to screen the play of sensitive and shapely lips. He had a chipped and splintered English, which invariably proved more useful in a crisis than my own college-born and café-nourished French. Between French and English I came soon to know and love this peasant as one of the most faithful, tender, manly souls whom I had known in any country. His Catholic faith was untouched by the license of the times; he believed in ghosts as simply as his forebears, and was wont to tell a tale of the spirit of a grandsire who, when the family estate was in danger through the disappearance of a title-deed, appeared one night to Pierre's oldest uncle, and led him up the stairway to a little loft in which the precious document had been too carefully secreted. "When need is, they come back—sí, sí, M'sieu, they come back," he would say with the meekest insistence when I allowed myself to smile faintly at these delusions. He had a low-pitched, mellow