rain-water, and with bays and niches cut deep in the side to permit the
passing of any one meeting a line of pack-burdened men in the
shoulder-wide alley-way.

When they reached the forward firing trench, their admiration became
unbounded; they were as full of eager curiosity as children on a school
picnic. They fraternized instantly and warmly with the outgoing
Frenchmen, and the Frenchmen for their part were equally eager to
express friendship, to show the English the dugouts, the handy little
contrivances for comfort and safety, to bequeath to their successors
all sorts of stoves and pots and cooking utensils, and generally to
give an impression, which was put into words by Private Robinson:
"Strike me if this ain't the most cordiawl bloomin' ongtongt I've ever
met!"

The Towers had never realized, or regretted, their lack of the French
as deeply as they came to do now. Hitherto dealings in the language had
been entirely with the women in the villages and billets of the reserve
lines, where there was plenty of time to find means of expressing the
two things that for the most part were all they had to express--their
wants and their thanks. And because by now they had no slightest
difficulty in making these billet inhabitants understand what they
required--a fire for cooking, stretching space on a floor, the location
of the nearest estaminets, whether eggs, butter, and bread were
obtainable, and how much was the price--they had fondly imagined in
their hearts, and boasted loudly in their home letters, that they were
quite satisfactorily conversant with the French language. Now they were
to discover that their knowledge was not quite so extensive as they had
imagined, although it never occurred to them that the French women in
the billets were learning English a great deal more rapidly and