pers we paid three halfpence, for
halfpenny papers twopence! In a restaurant in the place we got a
dinner consisting of vegetable soup, fried potatoes, and egg omelette,
salad, bread, beer, a sweet and a cup of _cafe au lait_ for fifteen
sous per man. There too on a memorable occasion we were paid the sum
of ten francs on pay day.

In a third village not far off six of us soldiers slept one night in a
cellar with a man, his wife and seven children, one a sucking babe.
That night the roof of the house was blown in by a shell. In the same
place my mate and I went out to a restaurant for dinner, and a young
Frenchman, a gunner, sat at our table. He came from the south, a
shepherd boy from the foot hills of the Pyrenees. He shook hands with
us, giving the left hand, the one next the heart, as a proof of
comradeship when leaving. A shrapnel bullet caught him inside the door
and he fell dead on the pavement. Every stone standing or fallen in
the villages by the firing line has got a history, and a tragedy
connected with it.

In some places the enemy's bullets search the main street by night (p. 261)
and day; a journey from the rear to the trenches is made across the
open, and the eternal German bullet never leaves off searching for our
boys coming in to the firing line. You can rely on sandbagged safety
in the villages, but on the way from there to the trenches you merely
trust your luck; for the moment your life has gone out of your
keeping.

No civilian is allowed to enter one place, but I have seen a woman
there. We were coming in, a working party, from the trenches when the
colour of dawn was in the sky. We met her on the street opposite the
pile of bricks that once was a little church: the spire of the church
was blown off months ago and it sticks point downwards in a grave. The
woman was taken prisoner. Who was she? Where did she come from? None
of us knew, but we concluded she was a spy. Afterwards we heard that
she was a native who had returned to have a look at her home.

We were billeted at the rear of the village on the ground floor of a
cottage. Behind our billet was the open country where Nature, the
great mother, was busy; the butterflies flitted over the soldiers' (p. 262)
graves, the grass grew over unburied dead men, who seemed to be
sinking into the ground, apple trees threw out a wealth of blossom
which the breezes flung broadcast to earth like young lives in the
whirlwind of war. We first came to the