CHAPTER VBILLETS IN THE FIELD
People at home often imagine that our troopslivein the trenches. They do not. Generally speaking, they live in billets behind the line, and move into the trenches at regular intervals. They take their turn for duty in the trenches like policemen going on their beat. As a rule the procedure is for them to spend a fixed period in the front-line trenches, another period in reserve (living in billets behind the firing-line, which are occupied in rotation by the troops who, in this particular sector, are out of the trenches), and a further period resting somewhere in the rear. The turn for duty in the trenches is therefore something exceptional, requiring a special effort of endurance, for, if there is any liveliness, or, as we say out here, “frightfulness,” going, there may be no sleep for anybody for several days and nights on end, something demanding special preparations in the way of supplies of cigarettes and other luxuries likely to drop out if there is any difficulty about getting rations up.
The greater part of the life of our men at the front is therefore spent in billets in our zone of occupation. Naturally, these billets vary enormously. Roofless houses in ruined villages or dug-outsin the open in a country absolutely devoid of food of any kind are as like as not the sour lot of the troops awaiting their turn of duty in the trenches, though sometimes a village situated at no great distance from the firing-line will provide admirable accommodation for men just out of the firing-line. I dined one June evening with the officers of the famous Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry. I found them waiting their turn for duty in the trenches in a positively palatial mansion, the home of a wealthy French merchant of these parts.
I well remember the pride with which they showed me over their quarters. I saw their bedrooms, vast apartments with huge four-poster beds with heavy, old-fashionedciels, and their bath-room, renowned throughout their division—a pleasant, clean, white-tiled place, with three different sizes of baths, as great an array of douches as you would find at a spa, and an apparatus for warming bath-towels. When I thought of other officers I had seen, painfully scrubbing themselves in a few inches of tepid water in a leaky canvas bath in the sordid surroundings of a filthy Flemish farm, I agreed that the “Princess Pat.’s” had every reason to bless the good fortune which had endowed them with a super-bathroom within a few miles of the firing-line.
Before dinner we walked round the garden. It was a kind ofSt.James’s Theatre garden scene, with masses of greenery and banks of flowering plants and great beds of flowers gushing over on to the exquisite stretch of soft green turf. As we strolled they told me of their charming host and hostess.The latter, it appeared, had given them their best rooms, and had installed for them a special kitchen, where their orderlies might mess about—as orderlies do all over the world—to their heart’s content. The model of charity and goodness, this French merchant and his lady wife every morning distributed handfuls of copper to the poor of the place who gathered in long files at their gates. On the Feast of the Sacred Heart in June the host and hostess, patterns of pious Catholics, sent a message, worded with charming diffidence, to the British officers asking them whether they would care to join in a service of prayer in the private chapel of the mansion. The Feast of the Sacred Heart had been set aside by the French Bishops as a special day of intercession for the victory of French arms. Of course the officers agreed. Presently you might have seen them assembled in the little chapel with the host and hostess and the members of their household, the stalwart forms of the Canadian officers, heroes of the stricken field of Ypres, kneeling in prayer to the God that knows not nations for the triumph of the right. Afterwards the host took his guests down to his little study, and there, in a bottle of his best wine, cobwebbed and reverently handled, the company drank success to the Allied arms.
In the billets near the front our men are birds of passage. One goes up to the trenches as light as possible, so everything that is not essential for the comfort of the inner and outer man in the highly uncomfortable surroundings of the front line is left behind. These squalid ruined houses in the wreckedvillages behind the firing-line are sad places to visit when the battalion returning to them has been in action. There in the common room which the officers use both for messing and for sleeping you may see the kits and personal belongings of officers who will return to that billet no more. You may see letters there addressed to the dead, unopened, expectant, as though waiting to be unburdened of the messages of love and anxious inquiry they bear.
Ah, those empty billets at the front! Their atmosphere is charged with mourning. With what tense expression one sees in the face of men who have been through a modern artillery bombardment. The survivors sit about in silence, seeming almost to resent the presence of the new-comers drafted in from England without delay to take the places of their fallen comrades. This depression, however, is only a phase. It soon passes. Men get used to the loss of their comrades. But if you know them well you will find how hard, how defiant, how reckless it makes them.
A battalion that has “copped it,” as the soldiers say, is not allowed to sit about in billets and brood over its losses. For they will brood unless they are stirred up. After Neuve Chapelle Sir John French, going round the battalions that had taken part in that gallant fight, came upon some depleted billets, such as I have described, with the Colonel, one of the few officers surviving, sitting by the fire with his head between his hands, prone to overwhelming grief. The Commander-in-Chief is a man of heart and understanding. He talked to that Colonel as one soldier toanother, and told him that the losses of his fine battalion were the price that had to be paid for victory. Then Sir John had the battalion paraded, and spoke to the men in the same sense.
This war gets you by the heart-strings when you see the awful gaps it tears in the ranks of men who have been closely associated for years. After that fight at Neuve Chapelle, when our losses were heavy, but not so heavy as in fights to come, I lunched with the Rifle Brigade in their billets close behind the firing-line. The battalion had been the first in the village of Neuve Chapelle, and over lunch (out of tin plates in a workman’s cottage) the Colonel and the officers gave me a most picturesque account of the Riflemen’s sweeping rush into the ruined village, and their adventures in getting the Germans out of the cellars and dug-outs.
It was a jolly meal. Five of the officers were there, beside the Colonel, including the machine-gun officer (formerly the Regimental Quartermaster-Sergeant), who had just got his commission. Three months later I lunched with the Colonel again. He had by that time become a Brigadier. Of all that merry luncheon-party, only he and the machine-gun officer (now a Captain with the Military Cross, and promoted Brigade Machine-Gun Officer) survived. The other three were dead, killed within a few hours of one another on the Fromelles ridge. The survivors at luncheon that day spoke of them with infinite affection, with obvious regret, but without any lamentation. Death has another aspect out here. It is often the matter of a fraction of an inch. One friend istaken and the other left. And the survivor “carries on,” only in his heart wondering “Why he and not I?”
Our men make longer stays in the billets situated farther away from the front than in those which are merely the jumping-off place for the trenches. Some of the cavalry spent months on end in the same billets, cursing this horseless war and chafing at their inaction. From time to time they took their turn in the trenches, and played their part manfully, as at Ypres on May 13, when the flower of the cavalry suffered cruel losses from a terrible German bombardment. But for the most part they carried on what was practically peace training in conditions which were depressing and monotonous to the last degree.
Thus I fell in with a crack Hussar regiment billeted in some farms well off the main road. Their billets were so remote that it took me a good hour to locate them. After inquiring successively from two privates in anestaminet, a farrier-sergeant playing ball with a small girl in a courtyard, and a battered-looking young subaltern riding down the road, a long, low farm-house with a red-tiled roof, built round three sides of a yard in which a duck-pond, a dung-heap, and several enormous pigs were the outstanding features, was pointed out to me as the officers’ quarters. I side-stepped the dung-heap, skirted the pond, and, dodging the pigs, banged on the door with my riding-crop. “Entrez!” shouted someone within, and I entered the mess of the 3rd Hussars.
“Mess” summed up the scene rather well. Of the four or five officers in the room, most were lying, the picture of boredom, on sleeping valises which lined the walls of the long, low-pitched room. A table on trestles in the centre was piled up with maps, field-glasses, cigarette-tins, magazines, a mass of Sam Browne belts, a Sparklet bottle, a tin of shortbread, and some flowers in a shell-case. The stone floor was thick with mud, brought in fresh that morning, as the boots of the officers present certified.
I was rapturously received. One of the chairs was cleared of its contents. On shouts of “Orderly,” a door in the corner opened, and a strong smell of frying and a greasy-looking soldier in a grey army shirt and khaki trousers emerged simultaneously. He brought glasses and a bottle of local beer; the box of cigarettes was produced, and then I was ordered summarily to tell the company what was happening at home and at the front. Was America coming in? And Italy? (This was before Italy’s intervention.) What were they going to do with that fellow, Ramsay Macdonald? They heard nothing, nothing, where they were. Were the cavalrynevercoming into action in this dam-fool hole-in-the-ground war? They might be at Shorncliffe for all they were seeing of the war....
Would I come round the horse-lines before lunch? The man I had come to see, a Captain, conducted me via the dung-heap, the duck-pond, and the pigs to an orchard where the horses of this squadron were picketed in a sea of mud. It was a sad, weepingmorning, like a spring day in Ireland. The horses looked very fit despite the wet winter they had passed through. “Mind that little ’orse, sir,” said a grizzled old private as we passed. “Rather a character, that man,” said my friend: “re-engaged; typical old soldier; regular scamp. Talk to him.”
He was a wizened little man in the forties, with a horsy manner, and had been all through the retreat from Mons. Only one of his remarks has stuck in my head. I was asking him about the food. He was pleased to be very well satisfied with the efforts of the A.S.C. on his behalf. “No one ain’t got no cause to grumble,” he said, “and that’s the truth. You gets yer grub reg’lar, and that’s more than a lot of them in this army did before. Of course”—with fine sarcasm—“there is some as wants stewed apples and custard ev’ry day for dinner, and there’s no pleasing the likes of those. No, sir, the food’s all right.”
By the time we returned to the farm-house the table had been cleared and set with a number of tin plates, a loaf of ration bread, and some tin cups. It was a rough meal, there is no denying the fact. There were sardines ashors-d’œuvre, some very tough roast beef, and potatoes, and some tinned apricots and boiled rice. We washed it down with very strong tea and condensed milk out of the aforesaid tin cups. “D’you mind tea?” asked my host apologetically. “We mostly have it for lunch.” I did not mind a bit. But I wondered idly to myself what the 3rd Hussars would have said if, a few months previously, you had suggested tea for lunch in their elegant mess at home!
Puck, in his most mischievous mood, never conceived anything more glaringly inappropriate than the British soldier in billets in France. Probably no greater contrast could be found than, on the one hand, the French peasant, working from daybreak to nightfall, scraping and stinting and saving to realize a profit where he can, to add a franc or two to hisbas de laine, and, on the other, the British soldier—who receives about the same wage as a farm-hand in this part of France, unless he is in the Mechanical Transport, when with 6s.a day he is far better paid than the curé or the village schoolmaster—wasteful, liberal-handed, as thriftless about money as he is about food. Without warning the two are flung together. Suddenly they are called upon to live together on a footing of the utmost intimacy.
To know a man you must live with him. That is how the North of France has got to know the British soldier. After making due allowance for English madness—spleen, the French call it—the peasant has discovered the British soldier to be the most easy-going of lodgers, whose liberal allowances in the matter of rations and broad ideas about money enable all manner of small transactions to be arranged of advantage to the host and his cronies in the village, who is always ready to do odd jobs about the house, who is a kind of nurse to the children, who is, in short, the best of fellows imaginable. This is all to the credit side. On the debit side there is the British soldier’s unaccountable and inexplicable mania for washing himself, requiring quantities of clean cold water that appear positively incredible in comparison with thesmall jugful which suffices for the ablutions of the host and his entire family.
The German comic (God save the mark!) press loves to portray the “savage” British soldier “preying” on the North of France, to the despair of the unfortunate French peasant, abandoned to the clutches of the wicked English by an unscrupulous Government of Paris Chauvinists. In reality the “unfortunate” French peasant in these parts is living on British rations, and making more money than ever before in his life. In all the villages about our line the boys and girls of all ages are wearing British Army badges. I met a cowherd once who was wearing a most unmistakable pair of British khaki riding-breeches. I lunched one day at an hotel in a town in our zone where British ration bread was served at thetable d’hôte. The hostess noticed the query in my eye, and hastened to explain: “C’est un officier anglais qui loge chez nous et qui demande, comme ça, que l’on lui sert de son pain à lui.” That might pass for the bread, but the soft sugar had specks of black in it, those flakes of tea which you will always find in British ration sugar. I said no more, but paid without a murmur three francs for the worst meal I have ever eaten in France.
Billets in the Field: The British Soldier and His Peasant Hosts
Underwood & Underwood phot.Billets in the field: the British soldier and his peasant hosts.
It says much for the tact of our army in the field that it has wielded the wide powers conferred on it with the utmost loyalty by the French,vis-à-visthe civilian population, without any friction. In all the towns and villages of our zone of occupation you will see printed notices signed by “Le Général Commandant la —— Armée Anglaise,” or “Le CapitaineA.P.M.” (Assistant Provost-Marshal), with directions for the closing of cafés andestaminetsat a fixed time, and the hour by which the civilian population must be indoors. In most places the sale of spirits to the British Army is absolutely prohibited. If anestaminetoffends in any way against these regulations, the British authorities have power to close it—a power that is often exercised. There is no direct intercourse between the British military authorities and the civilian population, however. The Frenchofficiers de liaisonattached to the different armies and corps and the Mayors act as go-betweens. Things work very smoothly by this arrangement, which removes the disagreeable possibility of our military authorities having to exercise direct pressure on the French civilians. Billeting and requisitioning are worked on similar lines, and there is a Claims Commission which, in consultation with the French, deals with the redemption of requisitioning receipts and claims for indemnity for damages, etc.
The rank and file of our army that went to Mons knew practically only two words of French, apart fromWee weeandNong, French words familiar to every Britisher since the days of Boney, and those weresouvenirandbong. The British Army increased its French vocabulary by these two words in the course of its triumphal progress from the sea coast to the interior through villagesen fête, where the peasants loaded the troops with good things of every description, asking only in return a badge as asouvenir. That is why most of our men went into action badgeless, and the giving away of badgeshad to be prohibited. That is why to-day, when you see a man with the initials of his regiment written in faded ink on his cap in default of a badge, you may know almost to a certainty that that man went through the great retreat.
The British Army has improved its acquaintance with the French tongue since those early days of the war. It has, indeed, contrived a kind oflingua francaas a vehicle of speech between itself and its hosts in the billets. The vocabulary is small, being in the main restricted to articles of food and drink. Grammar is a negligible quality, and the accent varies from the clipped speech of North Britain to the broad burr of the West of England. The French being reputed a race which sets great store by politeness,sivvoo-playis freely tacked on to all sentences in conversation with the natives. The difficulties of the modification of the definite article are simply abridged by prefixing to the substantivedoo(du). Thus, milk isdoolay, breaddoopong, waterdoolo, winedoovang. Jam, indispensable adjunct to all meals of our army in the field, has, as every schoolboy knows, no exact equivalent in French, for the simple reason that the French seldom eat jam except in the form of a kind of fruit jelly which they callconfiture. But the British soldier never hesitated. The army slang for jam is, I believe,pozorpozzie, so jam becamedoopoz, and was speedily recognized by the natives under that form.
The peasants on their side have fallen into a kind of pigeon French, accompanied by a good deal of simple gesture, which, even with the most elementaryvocabulary, is extremely easy to understand. As the population of the region of France abutting on the Belgian frontier speaks Flemish as well as French, the peasants in some parts of our line are able to draw on Flemish (which has many words resembling English) to supplement their vocabulary in talking withles solgaires, as they call them. The children, with childhood’s ready ear for languages, pick up English from our men extraordinarily fast. The ragged urchins who sell the London newspapers at G.H.Q. (General Headquarters) every evening have gathered quite a lot of English one way and another, though, I must say, some of their expressions savour very strongly of “our army in Flanders.”
Our men, too, are very quick about French. On Sunday afternoons in the villages in the rear you may seeMr.Atkins going for a quiet stroll with his host in billets, some gnarled old peasant, and carrying on quite an animated conversation with him about the crops and what not. The mess orderlies at G.H.Q. are wonderful. On market-days they are to be seen in the Grand’ Place, baskets on their arms, haggling away as fluently as may be in French with the old women selling butter and eggs and fish and fruit.
Our army in the field has a fine sweeping way with the pronunciation of the names of places in its zone of occupation.WipersandPlug Streetare classical and well-known examples of the phonetic adaptation of such names. In many cases a place, as pronounced by our men, is instantly recognized when seen in print, a fine tribute to the correctnessof their phonetics. Often their pronunciation is a very close imitation of what the name of the place sounds like in the mouth of a Flemish boor. “Wipers” is astoundingly near the Flemish pronunciation of Ypres. In the same wayGertie-wears-velvetis an almost perfect phonetic rendering ofGodewaersvelde, and easy to remember at that. I have amused myself by keeping a little list of the pronunciation by our army of some of the names familiar to them in our zone of operations:
The amusing thing is that the whole army has adopted this nomenclature. You will hear Staff officers who know French well speaking of “Arm-in-tears” and “White Sheet.” With the Expeditionary Force it is “the thing” to do as the army does.
There is no doubt that our men were very uncomfortable both in the trenches and out during the long wet winter in Flanders. Even after a dry spell in the summer a heavy shower sufficed to turn the roads and paths and communication trenches aboutthe firing-line into regular quagmires. But the warm air of a perfect summer, when the sun is never long absent, puts a different complexion on everything. The quagmires dry up, the hot sunshine evaporates the moisture in sodden garments, and the exquisite garb in which summer clothes these Flanders flats, so gloomy and repelling in winter, quickly restores depressed spirits.
In its summer dress Flanders indeed is very fair. Behind the firing-line the wind and the birds have done the work of man. The fields are all asway with wheat and barley and oats, sprung up of themselves, splashed with great stains of scarlet and blue where poppies and cornflowers nod in the breeze. Nature has scattered with a liberal hand these most English of flowers, suggestive of all that is most beautiful in the English countryside, wherever the sappers’ pick has thrown up the clods of earth, be it from a trench, be it from a grave. In the little gardens about the shattered homesteads, where abandoned equipment, ends of hospital dressings, scattered cartridges, and empty ammunition boxes tell of the war that has passed that way, the scarlet ramblers still scramble with flaming petals athwart the blasted walls, in and out of the empty window-frames. The red roofs of the farms nestling in masses of swaying greenery, the roses in the village gardens, the blooming hedgerows—all this is the beauty of summer England, surest cure for home-sickness and ennui.
Very wisely the military authorities out here have always encouraged the playing of games by the men in their periods of recreation. They have recognizedthat games keep the men physically fit, and also take their minds off the dangers and hardships of their life at the front. Games keep the men from brooding over the perils they have escaped as over the dangers that may stand before. Games keep them out of mischief, from loafing about the villages and clandestine drinking, which so often leads to unreflected acts. It is in no spirit of frivolity, but in the spirit of the old maxim, “Mens sana in corpore sano,” that our men while away their leisure hours with cricket and football and sing-songs. I am anxious to reaffirm this, to all Englishmen, self-evident truth because (there is no object in cloaking the matter) the French have shown at times a tendency to be scandalized at the recreations of our army in the field. As time has gone on, and they have come to know us even better than before, they have begun to understand that the Englishman, in taking his games with him into the field of war, is only carrying on our great system of national hygiene which has turned out all our great fighters of history from Francis Drake to the Grenfells.
Therefore, fair weather or foul, our army in the field contrives to amuse itself in its leisure hours, sparse though they may be. In winter it played football. The ground was always rough, and sometimes pitted with shell-holes. Four of the black and white posts which the signallers use for laying their field telegraph wires served as goal. But the ball was tight and firm, blown up by some kindly A.S.C. driver with his tyre-pump, the players were hard and keen. I have seen many a good game played not amile behind the firing-line, always liable to be disturbed by sporadic outbursts of German “frightfulness.”
Cricket at the Front.
“Daily Mail” phot.Cricket at the Front.
Summer brought cricket and rounders. Real cricket bats were seldom seen, but quite a serviceable substitute can be fashioned out of a packing-case, which will also supply both stumps and bails. With a composition ball and willing and eager fielders many excellent games were played in all kinds of surroundings, on every imaginable—and unimaginable—sort of wicket. A brigade of the Indian Cavalry had a rounders team of which great things were said. The Machine Gun School introduced badminton. The war correspondents’ mess invented a weird kind of pseudo-cricket played with a broomstick and a soft ball.
During the winter two concert parties had a great vogue. The one, “The Follies,” was run by the 4th Division, and consisted of army talent assisted by two charming young ladies, one a refugee from Lille, the other, I believe, a daughter of anestaminetkeeper at Armentières, where “The Follies” performed several times a week for months. I never heard them, but I am told that their “show” was excellent, and attracted spectators from far down our line. Thepièce de résistancewas, I believe, the singing of “Sister Susie’s Sewing Shirts for Soldiers” by the young female refugee, a considerable feat if you remember that the young person did not know a word of English. Most of “The Follies” are dead by now, killed in action in the spring. Thus does cruel war break up pleasant partnership. The twoyoung ladies were absorbed in the second concert party, “The Fancies,” which also had a successful career.
In an existence which, save for the spells of fighting, is comparatively monotonous, the weekly baths arranged for the men are quite an event. The danger of vermin as the transmitters of disease aroused the medical authorities, at an early stage of the campaign, to the necessity of providing regular bathing facilities for the men in the firing-line. The numerous large buildings in this part of France afforded ideal wash-houses, and “bathing-stations,” as they are called, are now established in all divisional areas. Here, while the men are enjoying a good scrub-down with plenty of soap in huge vats and tubs filled with hot water, their uniform is disinfected and their soiled shirts, underwear, and socks are replaced by clean ones. On bathing days, which are mostly every day, these bathing-stations are a sight that does the heart good, so delighted are the men to get their bodies clean, to have the feel of clean underwear next their skin. If needs be, the British soldier will put up with any amount of discomfort. But the discomfort he resents most of all is to be deprived of his soap and water. “Cleaning up” morning and evening is as much a rite with our army in the field as the morning and evening prayer of the Moslem.
The installation of these bathing-stations was the idea of a young officer of the R.A.M.C. It frequently happens in our army in the field that, if a man happens on a good idea, he is told to go “ahead with it.” This young doctor’s idea was a very happyone, and he “went ahead with it” to such good purpose that it was copied, and, as I have said, “bathing-stations” were arranged throughout the army. They are now show-places to which the distinguished visitor is invariably conducted. It is whispered that sometimes, when these visits have been arranged at short notice, bathers are not available, so a squad of men, who perhaps had had their bath the day before, are ordered to the bath and are solemnly washed again. Though perhaps on these occasions the clothing and bodies of the men seem surprisingly clean, the visitors to the “star” bathing-station, where personages of note are always conducted, can see “the real thing” in the shape of a lamentable garment preserved between two sheets of glass. It is known as “The Lousy Shirt,” and is an indisputably genuine relic of winter, literally covered with the cremated remains of hundreds of this most unconventional insect. The doctor in charge of the bathing-station declares his intention of presenting the shirt to the United Service Museum after the war.
In many parts of the line, where the German rarely desists from “frightfulness,” the troops waiting their turn in the trenches live entirely in dug-outs, as such houses as are still standing are not safe owing to shell-fire. A dug-out is, as its name implies, a shelter scraped out of the ground, the earth being laid on timbers placed crosswise on top. A dug-out will afford adequate cover against bullets and shrapnel and splinters of shell. It will not as a rule, unless quite exceptionally solid, resist a direct hit by a shell.If a dug-out is struck fair and square in this way, its occupants seldom escape. Some of the dug-outs I have seen were models of neatness and ingenuity. One in particular, used as regimental headquarters in a village that had been totally destroyed—the 2nd Worcesters, the heroes of Gheluvelt, were there when I visited it in June—was reached by a neat flight of wooden steps and had practicable casement windows. Walls and roof were papered in an artistic shade of green, linoleum was on the floor, a mirror and coloured prints of General Joffre and Sir John French hung on the walls, and there were tables and chairs in addition to a camp-bed in a corner. A pigeon-hole with a slide in one wall gave access to a second room, “the office.” The place was dry and well ventilated. It had a great local reputation as the “super-dug-out.” A framed notice on the wall proudly attested the fact that it had been visited by H.R.H. the Prince of Wales.
Round about Ypres, where the country has been laid waste by shell-fire, everybody lives in dug-outs.
When up in the Ypres salient one day I ran across an old friend in the person of the C.O. of the 16th Lancers. He and his officers were living in dug-outs constructed in the grounds of a ruined country house. I reminded him that the last time I had seen him had been in the very handsome dining-room of the 16th Lancers mess at The Curragh. Then he was wearing the red and gold mess-kit of “The Scarlet Lancers.” Now he was in the worn and stained khaki, plastered with mud from top to toe, with a disreputable old cap with ear-pieces andmonstrously heavy boots. “Perhaps you’d care to have a look at our mess here,” he said, and pointed at a black hole in a mud-bank a few feet away. Outside some facetious orderly had affixed a notice-board inscribed “Hotel Ritz,” with various light-hearted remarks to the effect that it was licensed for the sale of beer and wines to be consumed on the premises.
This dug-out was what it purported to be, a hole in the ground, muddy and damp and depressing. At the back several sleeping-valises lay on the ground. There was an elegant table and some chairs, white-enamelled, with turned legs. “The table’s got a marble top,” said a sad-looking Major sitting there, “like the tables at the Carlton!”
I have visited troops in their billets in every part of our line. I have been to headquarters installed in fine old châteaux, with which I deal in a subsequent chapter; I have lunched with Brigadiers quartered in hovels so mean and filthy that they would disgrace the lowliest cabin of the West of Ireland; I have sat and chatted with sappers living in holes scraped out of the sides of a bank like kingfishers’ nests; I have seen our soldiers living in wooden hutments and under canvas; I have seen them in grubby little workmen’s cottages in suburbs of the industrial towns of the North of France and in dreary, rambling old French barracks. Sometimes they were comfortable (and the British soldier is able to make himself comfortable on astonishingly little!); generally they were uncomfortable. But they never grumbled at their rough lot. They groused abouttheir inaction and bemoaned their hard fate at not being able to “get a crack at the Germs.” By no single word, however, did they indicate that they regarded their conditions of life as anything exceptional, anything outside the great game in which they are engaged. The army does its best for them. Their food is plentiful, extraordinarily varied, seeing the difficulties of transport, and absolutely regular in every part of the line. The army gives them, amongst other things, cigarettes and tobacco and matches and newspapers. As my Hussar said, the A.S.C. does not run to “stewed apples and custard.” It cannot give them houses always; it cannot give them family life; it cannot protect them against the dark angel that stalks these Flanders flats by day and night. But it smooths things as best it can, and for the rest the cheerful philosophy of the British soldier “carries on.”