"Oh, a very cheerful lot," said a sergeant-major of the old Regular type, who was having a quiet pipe over a half-penny paper in a shed at the back of some farm buildings in the neighborhood of Armentieres, which had been plugged by two hundred German shells that time the day before. (One never knew when the fellows on the other side would take it into their heads to empty their guns that way. They had already killed a lot of civilians thereabouts, but the others stayed on.)
"Not a bit of trouble with them," said the sergeant-major, "and all as keen as when they grinned into a recruiting office and said, `I'm going.' They're glad to be out. Over-trained, some of 'em. For ten months we've been working 'em pretty hard. Had to, but they were willing enough. Now you couldn't find a better battalion, though some more famous... Till we get our chance, you know."
He pointed with the stem of his pipe to the open door of an old barn, where a party of his men were resting.
"You'll find plenty of hot heads among them, but no cold feet. I'll bet on that."
The men were lying on a stone floor with haversacks for pillows, or squatting tailor-wise, writing letters home. From a far corner came a whistling trio, harmonized in a tune which for some reason made me think of hayfields in southern England.
They belonged to a Sussex battalion, and I said, "Any one here from Burpham?"
One of the boys sat up, stared, flushed to the roots of his yellow hair, and said, "Yes."
I spoke to him of people I knew there, and he was astonished that I should know them. Distressed also in a queer way. Those memories of a Sussex village seemed to break down some of the hardness in which he had cased himself. I could see a frightful homesickness in his blue eyes.
"P'raps I've seed the last o' Burpham," he said in a kind of whisper, so that the other men should not hear.
The other men were from Arundel, Littlehampton, and Sussex villages. They were of Saxon breed. There was hardly a difference between them and some German prisoners I saw, yellow-haired as they were, with fair, freckled, sun-baked skins. They told me they were glad to be out in France. Anything was better than training at home.
"I like Germans more'n sergeant-majors," said one young yokel, and the others shouted with laughter at his jest.