I heard the graphic recital of a sergeant of infantry, which was typical of many others in those early days.

His section awakened one morning near Armentieres with a famishing hunger, to find an old peasant woman coming up with a great barrow-load of potatoes.

“These are for your breakfast, my little ones,” she said.  “See, I have some faggots here.  If you care to make a fire there will be roast potatoes for you in twenty minutes.”

“Madame, you are too kind,” said my sergeant.  He helped to make the fire, to pack it with potatoes.  He added his eloquence to that of his comrades when the fragrant smell made his nostrils quiver.  And just as the potatoes were nearly done up came a motor cyclist with orders that the section was to move on immediately to a place fifteen kilometres away.  It was a tragedy!  There were tearful farewells to those potatoes.  Fifteen kilometres away there was a chateau, and a friendly lady, and a good cook who prepared a dinner of excellent roast beef and most admirable fried potatqes.  And just as the lady came to say “Mes amis, le diner est servi,” up panted a Belgian cyclist with the news that German cavalry was advancing in strong force accompanied by 500 motor-cars with mitrailleuses and many motor-cycles, and a battery of horse artillery.  It was another tragedy!  And the third took place sixteen hours later, when this section of infantry which had been marching most of that time lay down on an open field to sleep without a supper.

Yet—­“Nothing matters except the rain,” said a friend of mine in the French artillery.  He shrugged his shoulders as he spoke, and an expression of disgust came upon his bearded face.  He was thinking, perhaps, of his beloved guns which lose their mobility in the quagmires of the fields.  But the rain is bad also for men and beasts.  It takes eight days for a French overcoat to get thoroughly dry after a bad wetting.  Even the cavalryman’s cloak is a poor shield against the driving rain, and at night wet straw or a water pool in a trench is not a pleasant kind of bed.

“War,” said one of the French officers with whom I have chatted, “is not only fighting, as some people seem to think.  The physical discomforts are more dangerous to one’s health than shrapnel.  And it is—­par exemple—­the impossibility of changing one’s linen for weeks and weeks which saps one’s moral fibre more than the risk of losing one’s head.”

The risk of death is taken lightly by all these men.  It is curious, indeed, that almost every French soldier has a conviction that he will die in battle sooner or later.  In moments of imagination he sees his own corpse lying out in the field, and is full of pity for his wife and children.  But it does not destroy his courage or his gift of gaiety or his desire to fight for France or his sublime endurance of pain.

The wounded men who pour down from the battlefields are incredibly patient.  I have seen them stand on a wounded leg to give their places in a railway-carriage to peasant women with their babies.  They have used their bandaged hands to lift up the baskets of refugees.  They forget their wounds in remembering their adventures, and the simple soldier describes his combats with a vivid eloquence not to be attained by the British Tommy, who has no gift of words.