lors down from
Nieuport to the great hospital of Zuydcoote on the Dunkirk highway,
there is a sign-board, a bridge, and a custom-house that mark the point
where we pass from Belgium into France. We drove our ambulance with the
rear curtain raised, so that the wounded men, lying on the stretchers,
could be cheered by the flow of scenery. Sometimes, as we crossed that
border-line, one of the men would pick it up with his eye, and would
say to his comrade: "France! Now we are in France, the beautiful
country."

"What do you mean?" I asked one lad, who had brightened visibly.

"The other countries," he said, "are flat and dirty. The people are of
mixed races. France is not so."

It has been my fortune to watch the sailors at work from the start of
the war. I was in Ghent when they came there, late, to a hopeless
situation. Here were youngsters scooped up from the decks, untrained in
trenches, and rushed to the front; but the sea-daring was on them, and
they knew obedience and the hazards. They helped to cover the retreat of
the Belgians and save that army from annihilation by banging away at the
German mass at Melle. Man after man developed a fatalism of war, and
expressed it to us.

"Nothing can hit you till your time," was often their way of saying it;
"it's no use dodging or being afraid. You won't be hit till your shell
comes." And another favorite belief of theirs that brought them cheer
was this: "The shell that will kill you you won't hear coming. So
you'll never know."

These sailor lads thrive on lost causes, and it was at Ghent they won
from the Germans their nickname of "Les demoiselles au pompon rouge."
The saucy French of that has a touch beyond any English rendering of
"the girls with the red pompon." "Les demoiselles au pompon rouge"
paints their picture at one stroke, for they thrust out the face of a
youngster from under a rakish blue sailor hat, crowned with a fluffy red
button, like a blue flower with a red bloom at its heart. I rarely saw
an aging _marin_. There are no seasoned troops so boyish. They wear open
dickies, which expose the neck, full, hard, well-rounded. The older
troops, who go laggard to the spading, have beards that extend down the
collar; but a boy has a smooth, clean neck, and these sailors have the
throat of youth. We must once have had such a race in our cow-boys and
Texas rangers--level-eyed, careless men who know no masters, only
equals. The force of gravity is heavy on an old