away. It was all very simple. In serving your country you risk your
life, and incidentally you may get a decoration for bravery. Why make
a fuss about it?

_An Old Flanders Hotel._

There are many kinds of hotels in the little towns and villages of
northern France, some good and some bad;--mostly good if you only want
bread, cheese and beer, and very bad if you want anything else. Still,
you do occasionally run across an hotel which is capable of providing
a decent meal, though the rooms and general accommodation are, as a
rule, exceedingly poor. Heat is a thing unknown. If you raise a row
and demand a fire, they will provide it for sundry francs and centimes
extra. In war time coal becomes more and more difficult to obtain, and
the inveigling of a fire out of mine host becomes increasingly
difficult.

The M---- Hotel was rather a pretentious hostelry. It occupied part of
the City Hall or Hotel de Ville which faced the Grande Place. The
Hotel de Ville is a rather good looking red brick building, three
stories high, and is said to be over 200 years old. In the centre an
arch way, protected by heavy iron gates, leads into an inner court,
occupied chiefly by stables. To the right is the entrance to the
police magistrate's office and court, and to the left is the entrance
to our Hostelry.

A typical old Frenchman, with a snow-white drooping moustache and
closely cropped white hair, runs the hotel with the aid of his rosy
cheeked daughter and a couple of maids. The old man spends his time in
dispensing wine and beer, looking after the maids, occasionally
cooking a meal for a particular guest, buying the food, and playing
billiards with the little groups of old cronies that foregather in the
common room each evening. Like all Frenchmen, he had been a soldier in
his time, and had never forgiven the Germans for 1870. His picture as
a young man in uniform, hung in the dining-room of the hotel.

Moreover, he was a musician, and before the war had played the French
horn in the town band. His banquet hall, which we were now using as a
laboratory, had been the band room and the home of all band practices
in the long winter months. How the old man did roll his eyes with
ecstasy and raise his hands with unutterable joy as he listened for
the first time to the wonderful mellow music of the British Grenadier
Guards' band as it played in the bandstand in the square. Handel's
largo, the overture to Tannhauser, and a fantasia on