pt them excited by a new revelation, gave
them, poor devils, an extra touch of courage to face the menace that was
ahead of them when they went to the trenches again.

XI

Our men were not always in the trenches. As the New Army grew in numbers
reliefs were more frequent than in the old days, when battalions held
the line for long spells, until their souls as well as their bodies were
sunk in squalor. Now in the summer of 1915 it was not usual for men to
stay in the line for more than three weeks at a stretch, and they came
back to camps and billets, where there was more sense of life, though
still the chance of death from long-range guns. Farther back still, as
far back as the coast, and all the way between the sea and the edge of
war, there were new battalions quartered in French and Flemish villages,
so that every cottage and farmstead, villa, and chateau was inhabited
by men in khaki, who made themselves at home and established friendly
relations with civilians there unless they were too flagrant in their
robbery, or too sour in their temper, or too filthy in their habits.
Generally the British troops were popular in Picardy and Artois, and
when they left women kissed and cried, in spite of laughter, and joked
in a queer jargon of English-French. In the estaminets of France
and Flanders they danced with frowzy peasant girls to the tune of a
penny-in-the-slot piano, or, failing the girls, danced with one another.

For many years to come, perhaps for centuries, those cottages and
barns into which our men crowded will retain signs and memories of that
British occupation in the great war. Boys who afterward went forward to
the fighting-fields and stepped across the line to the world of ghosts
carved their names on wooden beams, and on the whitewashed walls
scribbled legends proclaiming that Private John Johnson was a bastard;
or that a certain battalion was a rabble of ruffians; or that Kaiser
Bill would die on the gallows, illustrating those remarks with portraits
and allegorical devices, sketchily drawn, but vivid and significant.

The soldier in the house learned quite a lot of French, with which
he made his needs understood by the elderly woman who cooked for his
officers' mess. He could say, with a fine fluency, "Ou est le blooming
couteau?" or "Donnez-moi le bally fourchette, s'il vous plait, madame."
It was not beyond his vocabulary to explain that "Les pommes de terre
frites are absolument all right i