n the candlelight before stooping to feel my
way down three or four narrow steps to the cellar, where the farmer
ordinarily kept potatoes and vegetables. There were straw beds
around the walls here, too. The major commanding the battalion rose
from his seat at a table on which were some cutlery, a jam pot,
tobacco, pipes, a newspaper or two, and army telegraph forms and
maps.

If the hosts of mansions could only make their hospitality as simple as
the major's, there would be less affectation in the world. He
introduced me to an officer sitting on the other side of the table and to
one lying in his blankets against the wall, who lifted his head and
blinked and said that he was very glad to see me.

It is a small world, for China cropped up here, as it had at brigade
headquarters. The major had been in garrison at Peking when the
war began. If my shipmate on a long battleship cruise, Lt.-Col. Dion
Williams, U.S.M.C, reads this out in Peking let it tell him that the major
is just as urbane in the cellar of a second-rate farmhouse on the
outskirts of Neuve Chapelle as he would be in a corner of the Peking
Club.

"How is it? Painful now?" asked the major of Captain P-----, on the
other side of the table.

"Oh, no! It's quite all right," said the captain.

"Using the sling?"

"Part of the time. Hardly need it, though."

Captain P-----was one of those men whose eyes are always smiling;
who seems, wherever he is, to be glad that he is not in a worse place;
who goes right on smiling at the mud in the trenches and bullets and
shells and death. They are not emotional, the British, perhaps, but
they are given to cheeriness, if not to laughter, and they have a way
of smiling at times when smiles are much needed. The smile is more
often found at the front than back at headquarters; or perhaps it is
more noticeable there.

"You see, he got a bullet through the arm yesterday," the major
explained. "He was reported wounded, but remained on duty in the
trench." I saw that the captain would rather not have publicity given to
such an ordinary incident. He did not see why people should talk
about his arm. "You are to go with him into the trench for the night,"
the major added; and I thought myself very lucky in my companion.

"Aren't you going to have dinner with us?" the major asked him.

"Why, I had something to eat not very long ago," said Captain P-----.
One was not sure whether he had or not.

"There's plenty," said the