Do you know what struck me most forcibly?  You’ll never guess.  It was that men in long trousers look perfectly absurd.  I am so used to seeing the culotte and gaiters that the best-looking pantaloons I saw on the boulevards looked ugly and ridiculous.

I left the officer billeted in my house to take care of it.  The last I saw of him he was sitting at the desk in the salon, his pipe in his mouth, looking comfortable and cosy, and as if settled for life.  I only stayed a few days, and came home, on New Year’s Eve, to find that he had left the night before, having been suddenly transferred to the staff of the commander of the first army, as officier de la liaison, and I had in his place a young sous-officier of twenty-two, who proves to be a cousin of the famous French spy, Captain Luxe, who made that sensational escape, in 1910, from a supposed-to-be-impregnable German military prison.  I am sure you remember the incident, as the American papers devoted columns to his unprecedented feat.  The hero of that sensational episode is still in the army.  I wonder what the Germans will do with him if they catch him again?  They are hardly likely to get him alive a second time.

I wonder if the German books on military tactics use that escape as a model in their military schools?  Do you know that in every French military school the reconnaisance which Count Zeppelin made in Alsace, in the days of 1870, when he was a cavalry officer, is given as a model reconnaissance both for strategy and pluck?  I did not, until I was told.  Oddly enough, not all that Zeppelin has done since to offend French ideas of decency in war can dull the admiration felt by every cavalry officer for his clever feat in 1870.

Last Thursday,—­that was the 4th,—­we had our second releve.

The night before they left some of the officers came to say au revoir, and to tell me that the Aspirant, who had been with me in December, would be quartered on me again—­if I wanted him.  Of course I did.

Then the senior lieutenant told me that the regiment had suffered somewhat from a serious bombardment the days after Christmas, that the Aspirant had not only shown wonderful courage, but had had a narrow escape, and had been cite a l’ordre du jour, and was to have his first decoration.

We all felt as proud of him as if he belonged to us.  I was told that he had been sent into the first-line trenches—­only two hundred yards from the German front—­during the bombardment, “to encourage and comfort his men” (I quote), and that a bomb had exploded over the trench and knocked a hole in his steel helmet.

I don’t know which impressed me most—­the idea of a lad of twenty having so established the faith in his courage amongst his superior officers as to be safe as a comfort and encouragement for the men, or the fact that, if the army had had those steel casques at the beginning of the war, many lives would have been saved.