far off each other.  These places are connected by plenty of roads (often paved) and canals, and by quite an average mileage of railways.  See the plain from above, and the chief effect is one of trees.  The rounded tops of trees everywhere obscure the view, and out of them church-towers stick up; other architecture is only glimpsed.  The general tints are green and grey, and the sky as a rule is grey to match.  Finally, the difference between Northern France and Southern Belgium is marked only by the language of shop and cafe signs; in most respects the two sections of the Front resemble each other with extraordinary exactitude.

The British occupation—­which is marked of course by high and impressive cordiality—­is at once superficially striking and subtly profound.

“What do you call your dog?” I asked a ragamuffin who was playing with a nice little terrier in a village street where we ate an at fresco meal of jam-sandwiches with a motor-car for a buffet.

He answered shyly, but with pride: 

“Tommy.”

The whole countryside is criss-crossed with field telegraph and telephone wires.  Still more spectacular, everywhere there are traffic directions.  And these directions are very large and very curt.  “Motor-lorries dead slow,” you see in immense characters in the midst of the foreign scene.  And at all the awkward street corners in the towns a soldier directs the traffic.  Not merely in the towns, but in many and many a rural road you come across a rival of the Strand.  For the traffic is tremendous, and it is almost all mechanical transport.  You cannot go far without encountering, not one or two, but dozens and scores of motor-lorries, which, after the leviathan manner of motor-lorries, occupy as much of the road as they can.  When a string of these gets mixed up with motor-cars, a few despatch-riders on motor-cycles, a peasant’s cart, and a company on the march, the result easily surpasses Piccadilly Circus just before the curtains are rising in West End theatres.  Blocks may and do occur at any moment.  Out of a peaceful rustic solitude you may run round a curve straight into a block.  The motor-lorries constitute the difficulty, not always because they are a size too large for the country, but sometimes because of the human nature of Tommies.  The rule is that on each motor-lorry two Tommies shall ride in front and one behind.  The solitary one behind is cut off from mankind, and accordingly his gregarious instinct not infrequently makes him nip on to the front seat in search of companionship.  When he is established there impatient traffic in the rear may screech and roar in vain for a pathway; nothing is so deaf as a motor-lorry.  The situation has no disadvantage for the trio in front of the motor-lorry until a Staff officer’s car happens to be inconvenienced.  Then, when the Staff officer does get level, there is a short, sharp scene, a dead silence, and the offender creeps back, a stricken sinner, to his proper post.