“Give ’em their old tune, lads,” said one of the men, and from this battalion of new-comers who had just set foot in France to fill up gaps in the ranks, out there, at the front, there came a shrill whistling chorus of La Marseillaise.  Yorkshire had learnt the hymn of France, her song of victory, and I heard it on the lips of Highlanders and Welshmen, who came tramping through the British base to the camps outside the town where they waited to be sent forward to the fighting line.

“Vive les Anglais!” cried a French girl, in answer to the whistling courtesy.  Then she laughed, with her arm round the waist of a girl friend, and said, “They are all the same, these English soldiers.  In their khaki one cannot tell one from the other, and now that I have seen so many thousands of them—­Heaven! hundreds of thousands!  —­I have exhausted my first enthusiasm.  It is sad:  the new arrivals do not get the same welcome from us.”

That was true.  So many of our soldiers had been through the British base that they were no longer a novelty.  The French flower-girls did not empty their stalls into the arms of the regiments, as on the first days.

It was an English voice that gave the new-comers the highest praise, because professional.

“A hefty lot! ...  Wish I were leading them.”  The praise and the wish came from a young English officer who was staying in the same hotel with me.  For two days I had watched his desperate efforts to avoid death by boredom.  He read every line of the Matin and Journal before luncheon, with tragic sighs, because every line repeated what had been said in the French newspapers since the early days of the war.  After luncheon he made a sortie for the English newspapers, which arrived by boats.  They kept him quiet until tea-time.  After that he searched the cafes for any fellow officers who might be there.

“This is the most awful place in the world!” he repeated at intervals, even to the hall porter, who agreed with him.  When I asked him how long he had been at the base he groaned miserably and confessed to three weeks of purgatory.

“I’ve been put into the wrong pigeon-hole at the War Office,” he said.  “I’m lost.”

There were many other men at the British base who seemed to have been put into the wrong pigeon-holes.  Among them were about two hundred French interpreters who were awaiting orders to proceed with a certain division.  But they were not so restless as my friend in the hotel.  Was it not enough for them that they had been put into English khaki—­supplied from the store-cupboard—­and that every morning they had to practise the art of putting on a puttee?  In order to be perfectly English they also practised the art of smoking a briar pipe—­it was astoundingly difficult to keep it alight—­and indulged in the habit of five o’clock tea (with boiled eggs, ye gods!), and braved all the horrors of indigestion, because they are not used to these things, with heroic fortitude.  At any cost they were determined to do honour to le khaki, in spite of the arrogance of certain British officers who treated them de haut en bas.