Bully beef and biscuits at noon; bully beef and biscuits at our evening
meal, and no sight of land. Night came. The more hopeful of us did the
craning business over the deck rails for a few more hours. The
pessimistic, deciding France had ceased to be, returned to poker. We slept.
We woke. We watched the sun rise--over the sea!

About noon that day after the ration of bully beef had gone its round and
we, in consequence, were feeling pretty blue, there was a group of us
standing around doing nothing. Suddenly Tom King came rushing up in great
excitement. He had had an idea.

"Say, you fellows, I don't care a darn what any of you may say, I believe
these blinkin' English are sick of us and are sending us back to Canada!"

No such luck. Before sundown that evening we sighted land. We steamed
slowly into the port of St. ----. This is a large seaport town near the Bay
of Biscay, on the southwest coast of France. Why in the world they wanted
to take us all the way round there, I don't know. I was told that we were
among the first British troops to be landed at this port.

As soon as we disembarked from the boats that evening, before we left the
docks, we were issued goat-skin coats. The odor which issued from them
made us believe that they, at least in some former incarnation, had
belonged to another little animal family known as the skunk. Ugh! The
novelty of these coats occupied us for a while, and if a sergeant or a
comrade addressed us we answered in "goat talk": "Ba-a-a, ba-a-a-a...."

It was apparent that the secrecy of troop transportation which held in
England held also in France. The populace could not have known of our