he
same porters there, the same old ship and lifebelts; and when I got to
Boulogne nearly all the same old faces on the quay to meet the boat! I
rubbed my eyes. Had I really been away two years or was it only a sort
of lengthy nightmare? I walked down the gangway and there was the same
old rogue of a porter in his blue smocking. Yet the town seemed
strangely quiet without the incessant marching of feet as the troops
came and went. "We never thought to see _you_ out here again, Miss,"
said the same man in the transport department at the Hotel Christol!

I went straight up to the convoy at St. Omer, and had tea in the camp
from which they had been shelled only a year before. This convoy of
F.A.N.Y.s, to which many of my old friends had been transferred, was
attached to the 2nd army, and had as its divisional sign a red herring.
The explanation being that one day a certain general visited the camp,
and on leaving said: "Oh, by the way, are you people 'army'?"

"No," replied the F.A.N.Y., "not exactly."

"Red Cross then?"

"Well, not exactly. It's like this," she explained: "We work for the Red
Cross and the cars are theirs, but we are attached to the second army;
we draw our rations from the army and we're called F.A.N.Y.S."

"'Pon my soul," he cried, "you're neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, but
you're thundering good red herrings!"

It was a foregone conclusion that a red herring should become their sign
after that!

The next day I was taken over the battlefields through Arcques, where
the famous "Belle" still manipulates the bridge, and along by the Nieppe
Forest. We could still see the trenches and dug-outs used in the fierce
fighting there last year. A cemetery in a little clearing by the side of
the road, the graves surmounted by plain wooden crosses, was the first
of many we were to pass. Vieux Berquin, a once pretty little village,
was reduced to ruins and the road we followed was pitted with shell
holes.

It was pathetic to see an old man and his wife, bent almost double with
age and rheumatism, poking about among the ruins of their one-time home,
in the hope of finding something undestroyed. They were living
temporarily in a miserable little shanty roofed in by pieces of
corrugated iron, the remains of former Nissen huts and dug-outs.

In Neuf Berquin several families were living in new wooden huts the size
of Armstrongs with cheerful red-tiled roofs, that seemed if possible to
intensify the utter desolat