‘Mais c’est tout ce qu’il y a de plus commode, madame,’ said Bourne, and he began to tackle her at once on the prospect of getting a more or less civilized meal.

‘Mais, monsieur, l’enchérissement est tel …’

But he would not be denied, insinuating himself into her good graces with the flexibility of an eel in a bundle of grass; but after making a number of suggestions, he had to leave it to her, only he insisted on her getting him a bottle of good wine, Barsac for choice; and he gave her some notes with which to do her marketing.

‘O, là, là!’ she cried amusedly.

‘What does she say?’ inquired Johnson.

‘That’s the French for “Good God”,’ said Bourne, laughing. They followed her out into the kitchen, where she collected her shawl and basket, her sleek head needing no hat, while they went on into the yard, and surveyed the vegetables which she grew in a little garden at the end of it. Then they heard a familiar sound, though it seemed strange there: the long whine of a shell through the air, and its explosion on the outskirts of the town. She had come out with her basket, and looked up at the sky very much as though she were wondering whether it would rain. Then again came the whining sound.

‘Ah, des obus!’ she said in a tranquil tone, and set off on her errands.

‘You’d think these Frenchies had lived in a war for years, and years,’ said Johnson.

‘Well, you do get accustomed to it, don’t you?’ replied Bourne. ‘It seems to me sometimes as though we had never known anything different. It doesn’t seem real, somehow; and yet it has wiped out everything that came before it. We sit here and think of England, as a lot of men might sit and think of their childhood. It is all past and irrecoverable, but we sit and think of it to forget the present. There were nine of us practically wiped out by a bomb this morning, just outside our window, and we have already forgotten it.’

‘It wasn’t a bomb, it was an anti-aircraft shell.’

‘Was it?’ Bourne asked indifferently. ‘What really happened?’

‘An anti-aircraft battery reported in answer to inquiries by Brigade that they had fired nine rounds on an enemy plane, and the fifth and sixth failed to explode.

That would give an accidental colour to the incident. One might anticipate an attack by enemy aircraft and avoid unreasonable exposure to it; but one could not anticipate a defective shell, which failed of its object and then exploded on striking the hard pavement of a street. Bourne kept what he thought to himself; but the men had said that no whistles were blown until after the first explosion, and the men on aeroplane guard had said that they did not actually see the plane, but blew their whistles when puffs of smoke appeared from the first couple of shells. If they were right, the official version was untrue, for the explosion which had killed two men in the street must have occurred before the shelling began. The practical futility of an aeroplane guard chosen at random from among the men was not a relevant consideration: they had not been trained to that particular work. It was also irrelevant to say that the bomb found its target by the merest chance. Bourne took the men’s point of view that these parades were silly and useless; and then he reflected, with a certain acidity of thought, that there was a war on, and that men were liable to be killed rather cursorily in a war.