coffee or tea or chocolate to any tired
and dirty Tommy who happened to come along. If you have any money, you
pay a penny; if you are broke, it doesn't make the least bit of
difference; you get your coffee just the same, and the smile that
always accompanies the service is as cheerful and genuine in the one
case as in the other. Many women of the oldest and most aristocratic
families of England have given, and are still giving, not only their
money but their personal labor to this work; making sandwiches,
boiling tea, yes, and washing the dishes, too, day after day and month
after month. You do not often hear of them; they are too busy to
advertise. But Tommy knows and I venture the assertion that no single
sentence or "slogan" has been as often used among the soldiers in
France as "God bless the women."

So we finally got everything off, wagons loaded and teams hitched up,
and about mid-afternoon made our way through the quaint old city to a
"rest camp" on the outskirts where we had time to wash and shave and
eat another biscuit before we received orders that we were to march,
at midnight, and entrain at Station No.--. It commenced to rain about
this time and never let up until we had entrained the next morning.

That was a night of horrors. Sloshing through the mud, over unknown
roads and streets, soaked to the skin. Oh! well, it was a very good
initiation for what was to follow, all right, all right.

Polite language is not adequate to describe the loading of our train:
getting all the wagons on the dinky little flat-cars and the horses
aboard. The horses fared better than the men for, while they were only
eight to a car, we were forty or more; and in the same kind of cars,
too. They look like our ordinary cattle cars but are only about
one-half as big. Forty men, with full equipment, have some difficulty
to crowd into one, let alone to sit or lie down. And, of course,
everything we had was soaked through. When I come to think of it, the
strangest thing about the whole business was that there were no
genuine complaints. The usual "grousing," of course, without which no
soldier could remain healthy, but I never heard a word that could have
been taken to indicate that any one was really unhappy. While we were
loading, our cooks had managed to make up a good lot of hot tea and
that helped some. We also got an issue of cheese and more bully and
biscuits and, after filling up on these, everybody joined in a
"sing-song