Sometimes they have bully beef.  I have eaten bully beef, which is a cooked and tinned beef, semi-gelatinous.  The Belgian bully beef is drier and tougher than the English.  It is not bad; indeed, it is quite good.  But the soldier needs variety.  The English know this.  Their soldiers have sugar, tea, jam and cheese.

If I were asked to-day what the Belgian army needs, now that winter is over and they need no longer shiver in their thin clothing, I should say, in addition to the surgical supplies that are so terribly necessary, portable kitchens, to give them hot and palatable food.  Such kitchens may be bought for two hundred and fifty dollars, with a horse to draw them.  They are really sublimated steam cookers, with the hot water used to make coffee when they reach the trenches.  I should say, then, surgical supplies and hospital equipment, field kitchens, jams of all sorts, canned beans, cigarettes and rubber boots!  A number of field kitchens have already been sent over.  A splendid Englishman attached to the Belgian Army has secured funds for a few more.  But many are needed.  I have seen a big and brawny Belgian officer, with a long record of military bravery behind him, almost shed tears over the prospect of one of these kitchens for his men.

I took many pictures that morning—­of dogs, three abreast, hauling mitrailleuse, the small and deadly quick-firing guns, from the word mitraille, a hail of balls; of long lines of Belgian lancers on their undipped and shaggy horses, each man carrying an eight-foot lance at rest; of men drilling in broken boots, in wooden shoes stuffed with straw, in carpet slippers.  I was in furs from head to foot—­the same fur coat that has been, in turn, lap robe, bed clothing and pillow—­and I was cold.  These men, smiling into my camera, were thinly dressed, with bare, ungloved hands.  But they were smiling.

Afterward I learned that many of them had no underclothing, that the blue tunics and trousers were all they had.  Always they shivered, but often also they smiled.  Many of them had fought since Liege; most of them had no knowledge of their families on the other side of the line of death.  When they return to their country, what will they go back to?  Their homes are gone, their farm buildings destroyed, their horses and cattle killed.

But they are a courageous people, a bravely cheery people.  Flor every one of them that remained there, two had gone, either to death, captivity or serious injury.  They were glad to be alive that morning on the sands of La Panne, under the incessant roaring of the guns.  The wind died down; the sun came out.  It was January.  In two months, or three, it would be spring and warm.  In two months, or three, they confidently expected to be on the move toward their homes again.

What mattered broken boots and the mud and filth of their trenches?  What mattered the German aeroplane overhead?  Or cold and insufficient food?  Or the wind?  Nothing mattered but death, and they still lived.  And perhaps, beyond the line—­