fficers
and men are simply unique. I never saw a greeting that was not
exquisite. The officers w ere full of knowledge, decision, and
appreciative kindliness. The men were bursting with eager devotion.
This must count, perhaps even more than big guns.

The Commandant, of course, presided at the vin d'honneur. His
glance and his smile, his latent energy, would have inspired
devotion in a wooden block. Every glass touched every glass, an
operation which entailed some threescore clinkings. And while we
were drinking, one of the Staff Captains--the one whose English
was the less perfect of the two--began to tell me of the career of the
Commandant, in Algeria and elsewhere. Among other things, he
had carried his wounded men on his own shoulders under fire from
the field of battle to a place of safety. He was certainly under forty;
he might have been under thirty-five.

Said the Staff Captain, ingenuously translating in his mind from
French to English, and speaking with slow caution, as though
picking his way among the chevaux de frise of the English
language:

"There are--very beautiful pages--in his--military life."

He meant: "II y a de tres belles pages dans sa carriere militaire."

Which is subtly not quite the same thing.

As we left the farm-house to regain the communication trench there
was a fierce, loud noise like this: ZZZZZ ssss ZZZZ sss ZZZZ. And
then an explosion. The observer in the captive balloon had noticed
unaccustomed activity in our village, and the consequences were
coming. We saw yellow smoke rising just beyond the wall of the
farmyard, about two hundred yards away. We received instructions
to hurry to the trench. We had not gone fifty yards in the trench
when there was another celestial confusion of S's and Z's. Imitating
the officers, we bent low in the trench. The explosion followed.

"One, two, three, four, five," said a Captain. "One should not rise till
one has counted five, because all the bits have not fallen. If it is a
big shell, count ten."

We tiptoed and glanced over the edge of the trench. Yellow smoke
was rising at a distance of about three lawn-tennis courts.

"With some of their big shells," said the Captain, "you can hear
nothing until it is too late, for the reason that the shell travels more
quickly than the sound of it. The sounds reach your ears in inverse
order--if you are alive."

A moment later a third shell dropped in the same plot of ground.

And even a mile and