unmentionable and
unwelcome member of war camps and trench life. The beautiful work and
the evidences of scientific training led me to ask who the mess
sergeant might have been in civil life. "Professor of Biology at the
University of ----," was the reply.

The most inspiring fact about the Channel ports at that time was the
regularity with which steamers arrived, crowded with soldiers, and
returned with wounded. We could see England on clear days from our
quarters, and could follow the boats almost across. The number of
trawlers at work all the year round, even in heavy gales that almost
blew us off the cliffs, was enough to tell how vigilant a watch was
being kept all the while. One morning only we woke to find a large
stray steamer, that had entered the roads overnight, sunk across the
harbour mouth, her decks awash at low water--torpedoed, we supposed.
Another day a small patrol, literally cut in half by a mine, was towed
in. But though both in the air and under the sea all the ingenuity of
the enemy from as near by as Ostend was unceasingly directed against
that living stream, not one single disaster happened the whole winter
that I was out. Our mine-fields were constantly being changed. The
different courses the traffic took from day to day suggested that. But
who did it, and when, no one ever knew. The noise of occasional
bomb-firing, once a mine rolling up on the shore, exploding and
throwing some incredibly big fragments onto the golf links, the
incessant tramp of endless soldiers in the street, the ever-present
but silent motors hurrying to and fro, and the nightly arrival of
convoys of wounded, were all that reminded us that any war was in
progress. Had it been permitted, the beach would have been crowded as
usual with invalids, nursemaids, and perambulators.

The second marvel was that in spite of the enormous numbers of people
coming and going, no secrets leaked out. We gave up looking for news
almost as completely as in winter in Labrador. We seemed to be shut
off entirely in an eddy of the stream, as we are in our Northern
wastes.

The spirit of humour in the wounded Briton was as invaluable as the
love of sport when he is well. On one occasion a small party were
going to relieve a section of the line. The Boches had the range of a
piece of the road over which they had to pass, and the men made dashes
singly or in small numbers across it. A lad, a well-known athlete, was
caught by a shell and blown ov