mporary camps, sometimes tents, sometimes tent-shaped shelters
of wood. There were batteries on the right everywhere, great guns
concealed in farmyards or, like the guns I had seen on the French
front, in artificial hedges. Some of them were firing; but the firing
of a battery amounts to nothing but a great noise in these days of
long ranges. Somewhere across the valley the shells would burst, we
knew that; that was all.

The conversation turned to the Prince of Wales, and to the
responsibility it was to the various officers to have him in the
trenches. Strenuous efforts had been made to persuade him to be
satisfied with the work at headquarters, where he is attached to Sir
John French's staff. But evidently the young heir to the throne of
England is a man in spite of his youth. He wanted to go out and fight,
and he had at last secured permission.

"He has had rather remarkable training," said the young officer, who
was also his friend. "First he was in Calais with the transport
service. Then he came to headquarters, and has seen how things are
done there. And now he is at the front."

Quite unexpectedly round a turn in the road we came on a great line of
Canadian transports--American-built lorries with khaki canvas tops.
Canadians were driving them, Canadians were guarding them. It gave me
a homesick thrill at once to see these other Americans, of types so
familiar to me, there in Northern France.

Their faces were eager as they pushed ahead. Some of the tent-shaped
wooden buildings were to be temporary barracks for them. In one place
the transports had stopped and the men were cooking a meal beside the
road. Some one had brought a newspaper and a crowd of men had gathered
round it. I wondered if it was an American paper. I would like to have
stood on the running board of the machine, as we went past, and called
out that I, too, was an American, and God bless them!

But I fancy the young officer with me would have been greatly
disconcerted at such an action. The English are not given to such
demonstrations. But the Canadians would have understood, I know.

Since that time the reports have brought great news of these Canadian
troops, of their courage, of the loss of almost all their officers in
the fighting at Neuve Chapelle. But that sunny morning, when I saw
them in the north of France, they were untouched by battle or sudden
death. Their faces were eager, intent, earnest. They had come a long
distance and now