r
boots were enlarged grotesquely by the clots of mud on them. Their blue
coats were soddened, and the water dripped out of them and made pools
round their feet. They were unshaven, and their wet faces were smeared
with the soil of the trenches.

"How goes it?" said the French captain with me.

"It does not go," said the French sergeant. "'Cre nom de Dieu!--my men
are not gay to-day. They have been wet for three weeks and their bones
are aching. This place is not a Bal Tabourin. If we light even a little
fire we ask for trouble. At the sight of smoke the dirty Boche starts
shelling again. So we do not get dry, and we have no warmth, and we
cannot make even a cup of good hot coffee. That dirty Boche up there
on Vimy looks out of his deep tunnels and laughs up his sleeve and says
those poor devils of Frenchmen are not gay to-day! That is true, mon
Capitaine. Mais, que voulez-vous? C'est pour la France."

"Oui. C'est pour la France."

The French captain turned away and I could see that he pitied those
comrades of his as we went over cratered earth to the village of
Neuville St.-Vaast.

"Poor fellows," he said, presently. "Not even a cup of hot coffee!...
That is war! Blood and misery. Glory, yes--afterward! But at what a
price!"

So we came to Neuville St.-Vaast, a large village once with a fine
church, old in history, a schoolhouse, a town hall, many little streets
of comfortable houses under the shelter of the friendly old hill of
Vimy, and within easy walk of Arras; then a frightful rubbish
heap mingled with unexploded shells, the twisted iron of babies'
perambulators, bits of dead bodies, and shattered farm-carts.

Two French soldiers carried a stretcher on which a heavy burden lay
under a blood-soaked blanket.

"It is a bad wound?" asked the captain.

The men laid the stretcher down, breathing hard, and uncovered a face,
waxen, the color of death. It was the face of a handsome man with a
pointed beard, breathing snuffily through his nose.

"He may live as far as the dressing station," said one of the Frenchmen.
"It was a trench-mortar which blew a hole in his body just now, over
there."

The man jerked his head toward a barricade of sand--bags at the end of a
street of ruin.

Two other men walked slowly toward us with a queer, hobbling gait. Both
of them were wounded in the legs, and had tied rags round their wounds
tightly. They looked grave, almost sullen, staring at us as they passed,
with brooding