men about the camp with a curious pleasure, and I realised that what
I wanted was to see red, or blue, or green, or anything else except
khaki.

Later on an order came out that camp commandants should wear coloured
cap-bands and coloured tabs on their coat. It suddenly became a joy
to meet a colonel. Certain camps flew flags in front of their
orderly-rooms. Very often the weather had faded the colours, but it
was a satisfaction to feel that once, at all events, the things had
not been drab. The Y.M.C.A., adding without meaning to another to its
long list of good deeds, kept its bright-red triangle before our
eyes. It seems absurd to mention such things; but I suppose that a
starving man will count a few crumbs a feast.

I am not a painter. If any one had talked to me before I went to
France of the value of colour, I should have laughed at him. Now,
having lived for months without colour, I know better. Men want
colour just as they want liquid and warmth. They are not at their
best without it.

Nothing seemed stranger to me at first, nothing seems more pathetic
now than the pains which men took to introduce a little colour into
the drab world in which we were condemned to live. Outside
orderly-rooms and other important places men made arrangements of
coloured stones. Sometimes a regimental crest was worked out, with
elaborate attention to detail, in pebbles, painted yellow, blue, and
green. Sometimes the stones were arranged in meaningless geometrical
patterns. They were always brightly coloured.

There was a widespread enthusiasm for gardening. Every square yard of
unused mud in that great series of camps was seized and turned into
flower-beds. Men laboured at them, putting in voluntarily an amount
of work which they would have grudged bitterly for any other purpose.
They wanted flowers, not vegetables, though any eatable green thing
would have been a treat to them.

When spring and early summer came to us we rejoiced in the result of
our labours, frequently fantastic, sometimes as nearly ridiculous as
flowers can be. There were beds of daffodils and hyacinths in which
it was possible, when the designer acted as showman, to recognise
regimental crests. The French flag came out well, if the flowers of
the tricolour consented to bloom at the same time. A sergeant, who
professed to be an expert, arranged a bed for me which he said would
look like a Union Jack in June. Unfortunately I left the place early
in May, and