The French soldier, on the other hand, fights under keen excitement.  He is temperamental, imaginative; as he fights he remembers all the bitterness of the past, its wrongs, its cruelties.  He sees blood.  There is nothing that will hold him back.  The result has made history, is making history to-day.

But he has the reaction of his temperament.  Who shall say he is not entitled to it?

Something of this I mentioned to Monsieur le Commandant as the line filed past.

“It is because it is fighting that gets nowhere,” he replied.  “If our men, after such an attack, could advance, could do anything but crawl back into holes full of water and mud, you would see them gay and smiling to-day.”

After a time I discovered that the same situation holds to a certain extent in all the armies.  If his fighting gets him anywhere the soldier is content.  The line has made a gain.  What matter wet trenches, discomfort, freezing cold?  The line has made a gain.  It is lack of movement that sends their spirits down, the fearful boredom of the trenches, varied only by the dropping shells, so that they term themselves, ironically, “Cannon food.”

We left the victorious company behind, making their way toward whatever church bedded down with straw, or coach-house or drafty barn was to house them for their rest period.

“They have been fighting waist-deep in water,” said the Commandant, “and last night was cold.  The British soldier rubs his body with oil and grease before he dresses for the trenches.  I hope that before long our men may do this also.  It is a great protection.”

I have in front of me now a German soldier’s fatigue cap, taken by one of those men from a dead soldier who lay in front of the trench.

It is a pathetic cap, still bearing the crease which showed how he folded it to thrust it into his pocket.  When his helmet irked him in the trenches he was allowed to take it off and put this on.  He belonged to Bavarian Regiment Number Fifteen, and the cap was given him in October, 1914.  There is a blood-stain on one side of it.  Also it is spotted with mud inside and out.  It is a pathetic little cap, because when its owner died, that night before, a thousand other Germans died with him, died to gain a trench two hundred yards from their own line, a trench to capture which would have gained them little but glory, and which, since they failed, lost them everything, even life itself.

We were out of the town by this time, and started on the road to Ypres.  Between Poperinghe and Ypres were numerous small villages with narrow, twisting streets.  They were filled with soldiers at rest, with tethered horses being re-shod by army blacksmiths, with small fires in sheltered corners on which an anxious cook had balanced a kettle.

In each town a proclamation had been nailed to a wall and the townspeople stood about it, gaping.

“An inoculation proclamation,” explained the Commandant.  “There is typhoid here, so the civilians are to be inoculated.  They are very much excited about it.  It appears to them worse than a bombardment.”