e evening glow and take a pipe and a chat with the same homely
accustomedness, as if they were at a tavern. It is so in the jungle and
at a lumber camp. Now, that is what the millions of average men have
done to war. They have taken a raw, disordered, muddied, horrible thing,
and given it a monotony and regularity of its own. They have smoked away
its fighting tension, its hideous expectancy. They refuse to let
mangling and murder put crimps in their spirit. Apparently there is
nothing hellish enough to flatten the human spirit. Not all the
sprinkled shells and caravans of bleeding victims can cow the boys of
the front line. In this work of lifting clear of horror, tobacco has
been a friend to the soldiers of the Great War.

"I wouldn't know a good cigarette if I saw it," said Geoffrey Gilling,
after a year of ambulance work at Fumes and Coxyde. He had given up all
that makes the life of an upper-class Englishman pleasant, and I think
that the deprivation of high-grade smoking material was a severe item in
his sacrifice.

Four of us in Red Cross work spent weary hours each day in a filthy room
in a noisy wine-shop, waiting for fresh trouble to break loose. The
dreariness of it made B---- petulant and T---- mournfully silent, and
finally left me melancholy. But sturdy Andrew MacEwan, the Scotchman
with the forty-inch barrel chest, would reach out for his big can of
naval tobacco, slipped to him by the sailors at Dunkirk when the
commissariat officer wasn't looking, and would light his short stocky
pipe, shaped very much like himself, and then we were all off together
on a jaunt around the world. He had driven nearly all known "makes" of
motor-car over most of the map, apparently about one car to each
country. Twelve months of bad roads in a shelled district had left him
full of talk, as soon as he was well lit.

Up at Nieuport, last northern stand of the Allied line, a walking
merchant would call each day, a basket around his throat, and in the
hamper chocolate, fruit, and tobacco. A muddy, unshaven Brittany
sailor, out of his few sous a week, bought us cigars. The less men have,
the more generous they are. That is an old saying, but it drove home to
me when I had poor men do me courtesy day by day for five months. As we
motored in and out of Nieuport in the dark of the night, we passed
hundreds of silent men trudging through the mud of the gutter. They were
troops that had been relieved who were marching back for a re