d'Arc, Rollo the Norman, Duke William, Harold and many
others come forth from their hiding-places in the back of one's brain?
Although we passed through without a stop, we could see the wonderful
cathedral and the hospice on the hill and, crossing the river, we had
a fleeting glimpse of the delightful little village of St. Adrien,
with its curious church, cut out of the face of the chalk cliff; where
the maidens come to pray the good Saint Bonaventure to send them a
husband within the year.

On, past the field of Crecy, across the Somme which was to us only a
name at that time but to become "an experience" at a later date, we
made our slow progress across northern France. At a certain junction
we were joined by the rest of the battalion which had traveled from
England by a different and shorter route.

In the early hours of the morning we came to our stopping place, St.
Omer, which was then the headquarters of the British Expeditionary
Force in France. We did not tarry, however, but before daylight were
on the march--eastward. We stopped for a couple of hours, near some
little town, long enough to make tea, and then went on again. This was
the hardest day we had had. Every one was overloaded, as a new soldier
always is, and, moreover, our packs and clothing had not dried and we
were carrying forty or fifty pounds of water in addition to the
regulation sixty-one-pound equipment. Then, too, the roads were of the
kind called _pave_; that is, paved with what we know as cobble-stones
or Belgian blocks. On the smooth stone or macadamized roads of England
we would not have minded it so much, but this kind of going was new to
us: ankles were continually turning, our iron-shod soles eternally
slipping on the knobbed surface of the cobbles and, take it all in
all, I consider it the hardest march I have ever done, and I have made
forty-eight miles in one day over the snow in the Northwest, too.

About dark we were halted at a farm and told that we were to go into
bivouac and would probably remain there for a week or more. Now, one
characteristic of the good machine gunner is that he is always about
two jumps ahead of the other fellow, so, there being a big barn with
lots of clean straw in it, we just naturally took possession while the
rest of the troops were patiently waiting for the Quartermaster to
assign them to billets. Of course we had a fight on our hands a little
later but, by a compromise which let the signalers and sco