are often crowded by batches of German prisoners, villainous-looking rascals, and usually of the earth earthy.  I watched some of them entraining one day; with them was a surly German officer who looked at his fellow-prisoners with contempt, the crowd of inhabitants with dislike, and (so it seemed to me) his guards with hatred.  No one spoke to him, and he stood apart in melancholy insolence.  Perhaps he was the German officer of whom the story is told that, being conducted to the Base in a third-class carriage in the company of some of his own men, and under the escort of some British soldiers, he declaimed all the way down against being condemned to such low society, until one of his guards, getting rather “fed up” with it all, bluntly cut him short with the admonition:  “Stow it, governor, we’d have hired a blooming Pullman if we’d known we was going to have the pleasure of your society.  Yus, and we’d have had Sir John French ’ere to meet you.  But yer’ll have to put up with us low fellows for a bit instead, which if yer don’t like it, yer can lump it, and if yer won’t lump it, where will yer have it?” and he tapped his bayonet invitingly.  Needless to say, the speaker’s pleasantry was impracticable.  But the officer did not know that; he only knew the way they have in Germany.  Wherefore the officer relapsed into a thoughtful silence.

Hazebrouck has a witty and pleasant procureur de la Republique, who once confided to me that the English were “irresistible.”  “In war?” I asked. “Vraiment,” he replied, “but I meant in love.”

But the towns occupied by our Army are monotonously lacking in distinction.  To tell the truth they wear an impoverished look, and are singularly unprepossessing.  I prefer the villages, the small chateaux built on grassy mounds surrounded by moats, and the timbered farm-houses with their red-tiled roofs and barns big enough to billet a whole company at a pinch.  The country is one vast bivouac, and every cottage, farm, and mansion is a billet.  Near the edge of the Front you may see men who have just come out of action; I remember once meeting a group of Royal Irish, only forty-seven left out of a Company, who had been in the attack by the 8th Division at Fleurbaix, and I gazed at them with something of the respectful consternation with which the Babylonians must have regarded Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego after their ordeal in the fiery furnace.  Yet nothing of their demeanour betrayed the brazen fury they had gone through; they sat by the hedge cleaning their accoutrements with the utmost nonchalance.  They reminded me of the North Staffords, one of whose officers, whom I know very well, when I asked him what were his impressions of a battle, replied, after some reflection:  “I haven’t got any; all I can remember of a hot corner we were in near Oultersteen was that my men, while waiting to advance, were picking blackberries.”  It was a man of the North Staffords who, according to the same unimpeachable authority, was heard shouting out when half the trench was blown in by a shell, and he had extricated himself with difficulty:  “’Ere, where’s my pipe?  Some one’s pinched my pipe!”