, given over to industrial
pursuits, and approached by rows of mean little cottages such as you may
see on the slopes of the mining valleys of South Wales. Two things stand
out in my memory--one, the spectacle of a corporal being tried for his
life in the Town Hall by a court-martial--there had been a quarrel over
a girl in billets and he had shot his comrade; the other the sight of a
regiment of Canadians ("Princess Pat's," I believe), drawn up in the
square for parade one winter afternoon before they went into the
trenches for the first time. And a very gallant and hefty body of men
they were.

Poperinghe is a dismal place, and to be avoided.

Hazebrouck is not without some pretentiousness. It has the largest
_place_ of any of them, with a town-hall of imposing appearance, but
something of a whited sepulchre for all that. I remember calling on a
civilian dignitary there--I forget what he was; he sat in a long narrow
corridor-like room, all the windows were hermetically sealed, a
gas-stove burnt pungently, some fifty people smoked cigarettes, and at
intervals the dignitary spat upon the floor and then shuffled his foot
over the spot as a concession to public hygiene. Therefore I did not
tarry. The precincts of the railway-station are often crowded by batches
of German prisoners, villainous-looking rascals, and usually of the
earth earthy. I watched some of them entraining one day; with them was a
surly German officer who looked at his fellow-prisoners with contempt,
the crowd of inhabitants with dislike, and (so it seemed to me) his
guards with hatred. No one spoke to him, and he stood apart in
melancholy insolence. Perhaps he was the German officer of whom the
story is told that, being conducted to the Base in a third-class
carriage in the company of some of his own men, and under the escort of
some British soldiers, he declaimed all the way down against being
condemned to such low society, until one of his guards, getting rather
"fed up" with it all, bluntly cut him short with the admonition: "Stow
it, governor, we'd have hired a blooming Pullman if we'd known we was
going to have the pleasure of your society. Yus, and we'd have had Sir
John French 'ere to meet you. But yer'll have to put up with us low
fellows for a bit instead, which if yer don't like it, yer can lump it,
and if yer won't lump it, where will yer have it?" and he tapped his
bayonet invitingly. Needless to say, the speaker's pleasantry was
impracti