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There my friends and I slept on the stone floor,
with a scanty amount of hay under us for a bed and our coats for
coverlets. But before we slept we dined.
We dined on hard-boiled eggs and stale cheese--which we had saved from
midday--in a big, bare study hall half full of lancers. They gave us
rye bread and some of the Prince de Caraman-Chimay's wine to go with the
provender we had brought, and they made room for us at the long benches
that ran lengthwise of the room. Afterward one of them--a master
musician, for all his soiled gray uniform and grimed fingers--played a
piano that was in the corner, while all the rest sang.
It was a strange picture they made there. On the wall, on a row of
hooks, still hung the small umbrellas and book-satchels of the pupils.
Presumably at the coming of the Germans they had run home in such a
panic that they left their school-traps behind. There were sums in
chalk, half erased, on the blackboard; and one of the troopers took a
scrap of chalk and wrote "On to Paris!" in big letters here and there.


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