ous under-estimate of their requirements. It might have been
multiplied by five.

In the end there were no more _gateaux_. The stock was sold out. It
was not a large shop and many others had drunk tea there that
afternoon. The boys paid their bill and left, still astonishingly
cheerful. I cannot remember whether the boat sailed that night or
not. I hope it did. I hope the sea was rough. I should not like to
think that those boys--the eldest of them cannot have been
twenty-one--suffered from indigestion during their leave. Nothing but
a stormy crossing would have saved them.

If the spirit of the playing fields of our public schools won, as
they say, our great-grandfathers' war, the spirit of the tuck shop is
showing up in this one. The lessons learned as boys in those
excellent institutions have been carried into France. Tea shops and
restaurants at the bases, audacious _estaminets_ near the front,
witness to the fact that we wage war with something of the spirit of
schoolboys with pocket money to spend on "grub."

Nobody will grudge our young officers their boyish taste for innocent
feasts. It is a boys' war anyway. Everything big and bright in it,
the victories we have won, the cheerfulness and the enduring and the
daring, go to the credit of the young. It is the older men who have
done the blundering and made the muddles, whenever there have been
blundering and muddles.

"Mary's Tea" was for officers. The men were invited to "English
Soldiers' Coffee." It, too, was a tea shop and had a good position in
one of the main streets of the town. But the name was not so well
devised as Mary's Tea. It puzzled me for some time and left me
wondering what special beverage was sold inside. I discovered at last
that "Coffee" was a thoughtful translation of _Cafe_, a word which
might have been supposed to puzzle an English soldier, though indeed
very few French words puzzle him for long.

I was never inside "English Soldiers' Coffee." But I have no doubt it
would have been just as popular if it had called itself a _cafe_ or
even an _estaminet_. The case of "Mary's Tea" was different. Its name
made it. Half its customers would have passed it by if it had
announced itself unromantically as "Five o'clock" or "Afternoon Tea."

CHAPTER XI

ANOTHER JOURNEY

"_'Tis but in vain for soldiers to complain._" That jingle occurs
over and over again in Wolfe Tone's autobiography. It contains his
philosophy of life. I learned t