led villages. Instead, they were on the way to market with
garden-truck, pigs, and calves. On the drivers' seat the peasant
whistled cheerily and cracked his whip. The long lines of London buses,
that last year advertised soap, mustard, milk, and music-halls, and
which now are a decorous gray; the ambulances; the great guns drawn by
motor-trucks with caterpillar wheels, no longer surprise him.

The English ally has ceased to be a stranger, and in the towns and
villages of Artois is a "paying guest." It is for him the shop-windows
are dressed. The names of the towns are Flemish; the names of the
streets are Flemish; the names over the shops are Flemish; but the goods
for sale are marmalade, tinned kippers, _The Daily Mail_, and the _Pink
'Un_.

"Is it your people who are selling these things?" I asked an English
officer.

The question amused him.

"Our people won't think of it until the war is over," he said, "but the
French are different.

"They are capable, adaptable, and obliging. If one of our men asks these
shopkeepers for anything they haven't got they don't say, 'We don't keep
it'; they get him to write down what it is he wants, and send for it."

It is the better way. The Frenchman does not say, "War is ruining me";
he makes the war help to support him, and at the same time gives comfort
to his ally.

A year ago in the villages the old men stood in disconsolate groups
with their hands in their pockets. Now they are briskly at work. They
are working in the fields, in the vegetable-gardens, helping the
Territorials mend the roads. On every side of them were the evidences
of war--in the fields abandoned trenches, barbed-wire entanglements,
shelters for fodder and ammunition, hangars for repairing aeroplanes,
vast slaughter-houses, parks of artillery; and on the roads endless
lines of lorries, hooded ambulances, marching soldiers.

To us those were of vivid interest, but to the French peasant they are
in the routine of his existence. After a year of it war neither greatly
distresses nor greatly interests him. With one hand he fights; with the
other he ploughs.

We had made a bet as to which would see the first sign of real war, and
the sign of it that won and that gave general satisfaction, even to the
man who lost, was a group of German soldiers sweeping the streets of St.
Pol. They were guarded only by one of their own number, and they looked
fat, sleek, and contented. When, on our return from the trench