“None,” she replied.  “I have no way of keeping soldiers.”

“What about that apartment there?” asked the N.C.O. pointing to the drawing-room.

“But they’ll destroy everything in the room,” stammered the woman.

“Clear the room then.”

“But they’ll have to pass through the hall to get in, and there are so many valuable things on the walls—­”

“You’ve got a large window in the drawing-room,” said the officer; “remove that, and the men will not have to pass through the hall.  I’ll let you off lightly, and leave only two.”

“But I cannot keep two.”

“Then I’ll leave four,” was the reply, and four were left.

Sadder than this, even, was the plight of the lady and gentleman at St. Albans who told the officer that their four children were just recovering from an attack of whooping cough.  The officer, being a wise man and anxious about the welfare of those under his care, fled precipitately.  Later he learned that there had been no whooping cough in the house; in fact, the people who caused him to beat such a hasty retreat were childless.  He felt annoyed and discomfited; but about a week following his first visit he called again at the house, this time followed by six men.

“These fellows are just recovering from whooping cough,” he told the householder; “they had it bad.  We didn’t know what to do with them, but, seeing that you’ve had whooping cough here, I feel it’s the only place where it will be safe to billet them.”  And he left them there.

But happenings like these were more frequent at the commencement of the war than now.  Civilians, even those of the conventional middle class, are beginning to understand that single men in billets, to paraphrase Kipling slightly, are remarkably like themselves.

With us, rations are served out daily at our billets; our landladies do the cooking, and mine, an adept at the culinary art, can transform a basin of flour and a lump of raw beef into a dish that would make an epicurean mouth water.  Even though food is badly cooked in the billet, it has a superior flavour, which is never given it in the boilers controlled by the company cook.  Army stew has rather a notorious reputation, as witness the inspired words of a regimental poet—­one of the 1st Surrey Rifles—­in a paean of praise to his colonel: 

  “Long may the colonel with us bide,
    His shadow ne’er grow thinner. 
  (It would, though, if he ever tried
    Some Army stew for dinner.)”

Billeting has gained for the soldier many friends, and towns that have become accustomed to his presence look sadly forward to the day when he will leave them for the front, where no kind landlady will be at hand to transform raw beef and potatoes into beef pudding or potato pie.  The working classes in particular view the future with misgiving.  The bond of sympathy between soldier and workers is stronger than that between soldier and any other class of citizen.  The houses and manners of the well-to-do daunt most Tommies.  “In their houses we feel out of it somehow,” they say.  “There’s nothin’ we can talk about with the swells, and ‘arf the time they be askin’ us about things that’s no concern of theirs at all.”