into the German village. But, on the other hand, I should
not have walked back again....

When I left the village, and climbed up the hill to our own trenches
again, I laughed aloud at the fantastic visit to that grim little
outpost in the marsh. If all the war had been like this it would have
been more endurable for men who had no need to hide in holes in the
earth, nor crouch for three months below ground, until an hour or two of
massacre below a storm of high explosives. In the village on the marsh
men fought at least against other men, and not against invisible powers
which belched forth death.

It was part of the French system of "keeping quiet" until the turn of
big offensives; a good system, to my mind, if not carried too far.
At Frise, next door to Vaux, in a loop of the Somme, it was carried a
little too far, with relaxed vigilance.

It was a joke of our soldiers to crawl on and through the reeds and
enter the French line and exchange souvenirs with the sentries.

"Souvenir!" said one of them one day. "Bullet--you know--cartouche.
Comprenny?"

A French poilu of Territorials, who had been dozing, sat up with a grin
and said, "Mais oui, mon vieux," and felt in his pouch for a cartridge,
and then in his pockets, and then in the magazine of the rifle between
his knees.

"Fini!" he said. "Tout fini, mon p'tit camarade."

The Germans one day made a pounce on Frise, that little village in the
loop of the Somme, and "pinched" every man of the French garrison. There
was the devil to pay, and I heard it being played to the tune of the
French soixante-quinzes, slashing over the trees.

Vaux and Curlu went the way of all French villages in the zone of war,
when the battles of the Somme began, and were blown off the map.

XIII

At a place called the Pont de Nieppe, beyond Armentieres--a most
"unhealthy" place in later years of war--a bathing establishment was
organized by officers who were as proud of their work as though they had
brought a piece of paradise to Flanders. To be fair to them, they had
done that. To any interested visitor, understanding the nobility of
their work, they exhibited a curious relic. It was the Holy Shirt of
Nieppe, which should be treasured as a memorial in our War Museum--an
object-lesson of what the great war meant to clean-living men. It was
not a saint's shirt, but had been worn by a British officer in the
trenches, and was like tens of thousands of other shirts worn by ou