lodges with her mother. Then I cannot hold her. She is like a wild thing
to be gone. 'Voilà mon camarade!--voilà mon camarade!' Out she goes, and
is soon walking gravely beside him, hand in hand, looking up at him."
"How do they understand each other?" "I don't know. But they have a
language. Your sergeants often know more French than your officers,
because they have to do the billeting and the talking to our people."

The morning was still bright when the motor arrived, but the frost had
been keen, and the air on the uplands was biting. We speed first across
a famous battlefield, where French and English bones lie mingled below
the quiet grass, and then turn south-east. Nobody on the roads. The
lines of poplar-trees fly past, the magpies flutter from the woods, and
one might almost forget the war. Suddenly, a railway line, a steep
descent and we are full in its midst again. On our left an encampment of
Nissen huts--so called from their inventor, a Canadian officer--those
new and ingenious devices for housing troops, or labour battalions, or
coloured workers, at an astonishing saving both of time and material. In
shape like the old-fashioned beehive, each hut can be put up by four or
six men in a few hours. Everything is, of course, standardised, and the
wood which lines their corrugated iron is put together in the simplest
and quickest ways, ways easily suggested, no doubt, to the Canadian
mind, familiar with "shacks" and lumber camps. We shall come across them
everywhere along the front. But on this first occasion my attention is
soon distracted from them, for as we turn a corner beyond the hut
settlement, which I am told is that of a machine-gun detachment, there
is an exclamation from D----.

_Tanks_! The officer in front points smiling to a field just ahead.
There is one of them--the monster!--taking its morning exercise;
practising up and down the high and almost perpendicular banks by which