one of our armies on the line, spoke to me of it with emphasis. "The
testimony is universal, and it is equally creditable to both sides." The
French civilian in town and country is, no doubt, profiting by the large
demand and prompt payments of the British forces. But just as in the case
of the women munition workers, there is infinitely more in it than money.
On the British part there is, in both officers and men, a burning sympathy
for what France has suffered, whether from the outrages of a brutal
enemy, or from the inevitable hardships of war. The headquarters of the
General I have mentioned were not more than fifteen or twenty miles from
towns where unspeakable things were done by German soldiers--officers no
less than men--in the first weeks of the struggle. With such deeds the
French peasantry and small townsfolk, as they still remain in Picardy and
Artois, can and do contrast, day by day, the temper, the courtesy, the
humanity of the British soldier. Great Britain, of course, is a friend and
ally; and Germany is the enemy. But these French folk, these defenceless
women and children, know instinctively that the British Army, like their
own, whether in its officers, or in its rank and file, is incapable,
toward any non-combatant, of what the German Army has done repeatedly,
officially, and still excuses and defends.

[Illustration: One of the Wards of a Base Hospital Visited by the King.]

[Illustration: A Howitzer in the Act of Firing.]

The signs of this feeling for and sympathy with the French _civils_, among
our soldiers, are many. Here is one story, slight but illuminating, told
me by an eye-witness. She is one of a band of women under a noble chief,
who, since very early in the war, have been running a canteen for
soldiers, night and day, at the large railway-station of the very base I
have been describing, where trains are perpetually arriving from and