Anyone who saw the tenderfoot pilgrimage to the Alaskan goldfield in ’97-8 and the same crowd six months later will understand what had happened to these men.  The puny had put on muscle; the city dweller had blown his lungs; the fat man had lost some adipose; social differences of habit had disappeared.  The gentleman used to his bath and linen sheets and the hard-living farmer or labourer—­both had had to eat the same kind of food, do the same work, run the same risks in battle, and sleep side by side in the houses where they were lodged and in the dug-outs of the trenches when it was their turn to occupy them through the winter.  Any “snob” had his edges trimmed by the banter of his comrades.  Their beards accentuated the likeness of type.  A cheery lot of faces and intelligent, these, which greeted us with curious interest.

“Perhaps President Wilson will make peace,” one said.

“When?”

A shrug of the shoulder, a gesture to the East, and the answer was: 

“When we have Alsace-Lorraine back.”

Under a shed their dejeuner was cooking.  This meal at noon is the meal of the day to the average Frenchman who has only bread and coffee in the morning.  They say that he objects to fighting at luncheon time.  That is the hour when he wants to sit down and forget his work and laugh and talk and enjoy his eating.  The Germans found this out and tried to take his trenches at the noon hour.  Interference with his gastronomic habits made him so angry that he dropped the knife and fork for the bayonet and took back any lost ground in a ferocious counter-attack.  He would teach those “Boches” to leave him to eat his dejeuner in peace.

That appetizing stew in the kettles in the shed once more proved that Frenchmen know how to cook.  I didn’t blame them for objecting to being shot at by the Germans when they were about to eat it.  The average French soldier is better fed than at home; he gets more meat, for a hungry soldier is usually a poor soldier.  It is a very simple problem with France’s fine roads to feed that long line when it is stationary.  It is like feeding a city stretched out over a distance of four hundred and fifty miles; a stated number of ounces each day for each man and a known number of men to feed.  From the railway head trucks and motor-buses take the supplies up to the distributing points.  At one place I saw ten Paris motor-buses, their signs painted over in a steel-grey to hide them from aeroplanes, and not one of them had broken down through the war.  The French take good care of their equipment and their clothes; they waste no food.  As a people is so is their army, and the French are thrifty by nature.

Father Joffre, as the soldiers call him, is running the next largest boarding establishment in Europe after the Kaiser and the Tsar.  And he has a happy family.  It seemed to me that life ought to have been utterly dull for this characteristic group of poilus, living crowded together all winter in a remote village.  Civilians sequestered in this fashion away from home are inclined to get grouchy on one another.