At the _gare_ here is a canteen for _voyageurs_ exclusively. A blatant and prohibitory notice says so with no uncertainty. This is English. An English girl is in charge of it. She gets as little respite as the _chef de gare_. Who can say when she sleeps? She is supplying tea and cakes and cigarettes to troops every day and every night. No one is refused at any hour, however unhallowed. French railway-stations on the lines of communication all carry such an English girl for such a purpose; and usually they are in the front rank of English aristocracy. The English nobility have not spared themselves for "the Cause." Their men have fallen thick; their women have resigned the luxury of their homes to minister to the pain and the hunger of the force in France. And they do it with a thoroughness apparently incompatible (though only apparently so) with the thoroughgoing luxury and splendour of their civilian way of life.
_Thursday, --th._--This afternoon I walked down the river that winds through the town and goes south. It is a comfortable, easy-flowing trout-stream. Beyond the town bridge it turns into pastures and orchards and cultivated fields, nosing a way through stretches of brown stubble, apple-groves, and plantations of beet. Groves of elm and beech overspread the high grass on its brink. The hop clusters with the wild-strawberry and the red currant: a solitary trouter stands beyond the tangle. The fields slope gently away from the stream--very gently--up to the tree-lined road on the ridge. The brown-and-gold stubble rises, acre beyond acre, to the sky-line; and in the evening light takes on a rich investiture of colour that is bold for stubble, but not the less lovely because it is virtual only. As the evening wears on, this settles into a softness of hue that you cannot describe.
Such is the Somme country: such is the land of war.
At nine to-night all the station lights were switched off. Advice had come from ---- of enemy aircraft approaching this junction. They did not come--not to our knowledge. But the _chef de gare_ waddled over to his private house and bundled wife and children down into the cellar--and _cave_, as they call it--and when he had seen them safely stowed, returned to his station to await orders. The French girls and women inhabit the cellar with alacrity at such times. Every house has its funk-hole, for there is hardly a dwelling so small as to neglect a vault for _cidre_ and _vin ordinaire_. "In the season" they lay up a year's store; as a rule, the _cidre_ is home-brewed, too. At table the jug goes round, filling the glass of the _enfant_ and the _père_ without discrimination. By the end of the meal the colour has mounted in the cheeks of the little girls, and they are garrulous and the boys noisy. Amongst the _cidre_ barrels there is good and secure cover from Taubes.