I had had in Valcartier.
He had been standing at the doorway of a store trying to talk to a
French girl when a couple of British officers passed. The man did not
see them till they were just going by and drew himself up to a sort of
a half attention. The officers passed, halted, and came back.

"Why didn't you salute?" queried one officer.

"I didn't see you," replied the man.

"Oh, yes, you did; you came to a kind of sloppy attention as we
passed," said the officer.

"Yes," said the man. "I did as you were almost past; but anyway we
don't salute much in our army."

"What?" said the officer, "are you a Canadian?"

"Yes, sir," said the chauffeur proudly, and the British officers went
on laughing heartily.

The officers we came to see were out and we seized the opportunity to
run over for a look at the shell-shattered town of Laventie--the first
battered town we had seen. To us, at that time, it was an
awe-inspiring spectacle, though nowadays it would be considered a
comparatively undamaged town.

The houses on the outskirts were quite intact, but as we approached
the centre of the town, shattered windows, pitted walls, and scarred
woodwork indicated that the town had been heavily shelled. Near the
church the buildings were wrecked; roofs were lifted off, windows
blown out, and walls were frequently half down or had great holes in
them, while the block right around the church was a heap of rubbish.

The church itself had been hit scores of times, and the walls though
still standing were perforated like a sieve. The stones in the
foundation of the church were fractured by the force of the exploding
shells into tiny fragments, still pressed together with the weight of
the material above them. So crushed were they that if removed, a tap
with a hammer would make them fall into thousands of splinters.

The houses round about the church had been completely razed to the
ground. Those adjacent were partly unroofed, with perhaps a wall blown
out showing an upstairs with a stairway swinging from the floor, beams
from the roof fallen over the iron bedstead, sheets of wall paper
dangling from the walls, and every other imaginable combination of
wreckage. And yet a few doors away down the street where the houses
had not been very badly damaged they were occupied by civilians who
tried to eke out an existence by selling candy and foodstuffs.

It is a never-failing source of wonder to see people in such places
which were b