The Motor-Bus in War

ur railhead for some months, and during t

the way of accommodation and so forth. I suppose this is not to be wondered at, and it would be curious to see what reception Allied foreign troops would receive in an English village. After a few days, however, they find Tommy is a good fellow and spends freely what little money he has. The shopkeepers in the little towns behind the line are as fortunate as the inhabitants of the invaded towns on the other side of the line are unfortunate. Among others, the debitants de boissons, or Estaminet keepers, do a roaring

plicated shopping with the greatest of ease, and carry on long conversations and arguments with the vendor meanwhile. There are, however, exceptions to every rule. A friend of mine, on one occasion, arrived late in the evening in a new village. It had been raining hard all day, as it only can in Flanders. Being wet through and very tired

les chevaux and huile pour les cheveux are two very different things! But Tommy is seldom at a loss. "Deux beers sivous play, Ma'mselle, compree?" he will demand as he enters an estaminet, and if Ma'mselle in question has any pretensions to beauty, he will not infrequently at a later stage of the proceedings, purely, no doubt, by way of pay

n a plus," do duty on many occasions and under varying circumstances. Tommy even sometimes carries his French phras

ort to conscription for the Army, and one can only hope that sooner or later some distinction will be made between the conscript and the man who, regardless of age and the cost, volunteered for service in the early part of the war. In an Army Service Corps unit particularly, one notices men whose appearance leads one to think that there is, t

ndustani, a little "pidgin" French will usually be found to be a common basis for conversation, or an old soldier, who has rejoined for the war and who many years ago perhaps served in India, will come to the rescue and explain matters with much gesticulation and

" It is the stock phrase of consolation and explanation. They accept the war, do these peasants and bourgeois of Northern France, in a spirit of optimistic fortitude, as something which has unfortunately got to be, and which shows no sign of ending, at any rate at present. Their hatred of the Boches, which they readily express, both verbally

not in the Army, the Navy, or the workshops, and this has been the same since the first 1914 mobilization in France. The older men are employed as sentries at level cross

a way that is truly remarkable. Never have I seen women and children do such an amount of manual work. The pay of the French poilu, formerly five centimes (a halfpenny) and latterly raised to twenty-five c

e is to be seen everywhere-in cafés, railway carriages, in the streets, etc.; and it contains three lines of straightforward a

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des ennemies

nch War Loan; they are obviously drawn by artists, and are in keeping with the best

are occasionally reported by different people, soldiers or civilians, who may have reason to suspect them. The various Assistant Provost Marshals are, naturally, only too anxious to catch real spies, and are not only willing but keen to investigate reports and incidentally inconvenience ninety-nine suspects in the hope of catching the hundredth. Curious

nvestigation in due course to be perfectly true. On being examined, he was asked among other questions if he could produce what he was alleged to have written in his pocketbook. This, he said, was a matter of impossibility, but he offered instead an explanation. He had, he stated, on the previous evening seen a girl who greatly attracted him; chancing to run across her again the following day, he hastily pulled out his notebook with

nsational details, the writer of it added that the supposed spy "swallowed" the note he had written, rather than produce it fo

e brasserie. It was now after midnight. Having given the sentries orders to load their rifles, but only to loose off in the event of their suspect endeavouring to make his escape or resist escort, and to shoot low at that, with my revolver in one hand I rang the brasserie bell with the other. It was one of those large bells suspended at some height, actuated by a long chain, and which have a way of continuing to ring for some time after the chain has been pulled. Very soon, up went a window on the first floor, and out of it appeared the head and shoulders of a woman, obviously aroused from her slumbers. I inquired in the best French I could command if there was an "Officier anglais" billeted in the house. She replied that there was one, and sh

at the same time to pull over his knees a fur rug which happened to be there-one of those magnificent bear-skin rugs which were sent out as presents to certain members of the Expeditionary Force by the Grand Duke Michael of Russia in the winter of 1914. In a few minutes the next village was reached, and passing through it my friend noticed with some surprise that his fellow-traveller was being greeted with cheers, thrills of laughter and hand-waves by the children and a few p

. My first impression was that he was dressed in a mixture of British and French uniform, possibly an ill-informed German spy, who, having heard of the belle alliance, imagined it to be carried to such lengths in practice that the uniforms of the two Armies were combined. I watched him for a minute, then followed, and getting even with him, wished him "Good-evening." There was no time to lose, so I got straight to the point and asked him his name and regiment. He inquired the reason of my apparent curiosity, and I admitted that the shade of his trousers had aroused my suspicions. He replied that he was in the 11th Hussars-th