cable. But the officer did not know that; he only knew the way
they have in Germany. Wherefore the officer relapsed into a thoughtful
silence.

Hazebrouck has a witty and pleasant _procureur de la Republique_, who
once confided to me that the English were "irresistible." "In war?" I
asked. "_Vraiment_," he replied, "but I meant in love."

But the towns occupied by our Army are monotonously lacking in
distinction. To tell the truth they wear an impoverished look, and are
singularly unprepossessing. I prefer the villages, the small chateaux
built on grassy mounds surrounded by moats, and the timbered farm-houses
with their red-tiled roofs and barns big enough to billet a whole
company at a pinch. The country is one vast bivouac, and every cottage,
farm, and mansion is a billet. Near the edge of the Front you may see
men who have just come out of action; I remember once meeting a group of
Royal Irish, only forty-seven left out of a Company, who had been in the
attack by the 8th Division at Fleurbaix, and I gazed at them with
something of the respectful consternation with which the Babylonians
must have regarded Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego after their ordeal in
the fiery furnace. Yet nothing of their demeanour betrayed the brazen
fury they had gone through; they sat by the hedge cleaning their
accoutrements with the utmost nonchalance. They reminded me of the North
Staffords, one of whose officers, whom I know very well, when I asked
him what were his impressions of a battle, replied, after some
reflection: "I haven't got any; all I can remember of a hot corner we
were in near Oultersteen was that my men, while waiting to advance, were
picking blackberries." It was a man of the North Staffords who,
according to the same unimpeachable authority, was heard shouting out
when half the trench was blown in by a shell, and he had extricated
himself with difficulty: "'Ere, where's my pipe? Some one's pinched my
pipe!"

But it isn't always quite as comforting as that. The servant of a friend
of mine, a young subaltern in the Black Watch, whom, alas! like so many
other friends, I shall never see again, in describing the church parade
held after the battle of Loos, in which his master was killed by a
shell, wrote that when the chaplain gave out the hymn "Rock of Ages" the
men burst into tears, their voices failed them, and they broke down
utterly. And I remember that on one occasion when some four-fifths of
the officers of a ce