They were tired, some of them,
after a long march, but they grinned back cheery answers to my
greetings, and scrambled merrily for the few packets of cigarettes I
tossed to them.
Thousands of these khaki-clad fellows lay along the roadsides looking
in the distance as though great masses of russet leaves had fallen
from autumn trees. They were having a rest on their way up to the
front, and their heads were upon each other's shoulders in a
comradely way, while some lay face upwards to the sky with their
hands folded behind their heads, in a brown study and careless of
everything that passed.
Away across marshy fields, intersected by pools and rivulets, I saw
our men billeted in French and Flemish farmhouses, of the old post-
and-plaster kind, like those in English villages.
They seemed thoroughly at home, and were chopping wood and
drawing water and cooking stews, and arranging straw beds in the
barns, and busying themselves with all the domestic side of life as
quietly and cheerily as though they were on manoeuvres in
Devonshire or Surrey, where war is only a game without death in the
roar of a gun. Well fed and well clothed, hard as nails, in spite of all
their hardships, they gave me a sense of pride as I watched them, for
the spirit of the old race was in them, and they would stick it through
thick and thin.
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