It is a strange place, this belt of land behind the firing-line. The men are out of the trenches for three days, and it is their duty, after perhaps a running parade before breakfast and two or three hours’ drill and inspection in the morning, to rest for the remainder of the day. In the morning you will see all the evolutions of company drill carried out in a small meadow behind a strip of woodland; in the next field an old man and woman are unconcernedly hoeing a cabbage-patch; then behind here are a battalion’s transport lines, with rows of horses picketed. Along the road an A.S.C. convoy is passing, each lorry at regulation distance from the next. In the afternoon you will see groups of Tommies doing nothing most religiously, smoking cigarettes, writing letters home. From six to eight the _estaminets_ are open, and everyone flocks to them to get bad beer. They are also open an hour at midday, and then the orderly officer, accompanied by the provost-sergeant, produces an electric silence with ‘Any complaints?’ It does not pay an _estaminet_-keeper to dilute his beer too much, or else he will lose his licence.
I often wonder if these peasants think much. Think they must have done at the beginning, when their men were hastily called up. But now, after fifteen months of war? It is the children, chiefly, who are interested in the aeroplanes, shining like eagles silver-white against the blue sky; or in the boom from the battery across the street. But for their mothers and grandparents these things have settled into their lives; they are all one with the canal and the poplar trees. If a squad starts drilling on their lettuces, they are tremendously alert; but as for these other things, they are not interested, only unutterably tired of them. And after awhile you adopt the same attitude. The noise of the guns is boring and you hardly look up at an aeroplane, unless it is shrapnelled by the ‘Archies’ (anti-aircraft guns); then it is worth watching the pin-prick flashes dotting the sky all round it, leaving little white curls of smoke floating in the blue.”
That billet was close to the firing-line. Here is a letter from a village, eight miles back:
“20th Oct., 1915. We came out here on Monday. The whole division marched out together. It was really an impressive sight, over a mile of troops on the march. Perfect order, perfect arrangement. Where the road bent you could often see the column for a mile in front, a great snake curling along the right side of the road. Occasionally an adjutant would break out of the line to trot back and correct some straggling; or a C.O. would emerge for a gallop over the adjacent ploughland.
