their
hearts to get one look at them there in Flanders and to see the way of
their life... How were they living? How did they like it? How were they
sleeping? What did the Regulars think of the New Army?

"Oh, a very cheerful lot," said a sergeant-major of the old Regular
type, who was having a quiet pipe over a half-penny paper in a shed
at the back of some farm buildings in the neighborhood of Armentieres,
which had been plugged by two hundred German shells that time the day
before. (One never knew when the fellows on the other side would take it
into their heads to empty their guns that way. They had already killed a
lot of civilians thereabouts, but the others stayed on.)

"Not a bit of trouble with them," said the sergeant-major, "and all
as keen as when they grinned into a recruiting office and said, `I'm
going.' They're glad to be out. Over-trained, some of 'em. For ten
months we've been working 'em pretty hard. Had to, but they were willing
enough. Now you couldn't find a better battalion, though some more
famous... Till we get our chance, you know."

He pointed with the stem of his pipe to the open door of an old barn,
where a party of his men were resting.

"You'll find plenty of hot heads among them, but no cold feet. I'll bet
on that."

The men were lying on a stone floor with haversacks for pillows, or
squatting tailor-wise, writing letters home. From a far corner came a
whistling trio, harmonized in a tune which for some reason made me think
of hayfields in southern England.

They belonged to a Sussex battalion, and I said, "Any one here from
Burpham?"

One of the boys sat up, stared, flushed to the roots of his yellow hair,
and said, "Yes."

I spoke to him of people I knew there, and he was astonished that I
should know them. Distressed also in a queer way. Those memories of a
Sussex village seemed to break down some of the hardness in which he had
cased himself. I could see a frightful homesickness in his blue eyes.

"P'raps I've seed the last o' Burpham," he said in a kind of whisper, so
that the other men should not hear.

The other men were from Arundel, Littlehampton, and Sussex villages.
They were of Saxon breed. There was hardly a difference between them
and some German prisoners I saw, yellow-haired as they were, with fair,
freckled, sun-baked skins. They told me they were glad to be out in
France. Anything was better than training at home.

"I like Germans more'n sergeant-majors,"