When life failed to provide a joke or two we fell back on rumours and enjoyed them thoroughly. They say that Fleet Street as a breeding-ground for rumour is surpassed only by the drawing-rooms of the wives of ministers of state. I have no experience of either; but a base camp in France would be hard to beat. The number of naval battles declared by the best authorities to have been fought during the early months of 1916 was amazing. We had them once a week, and torpedo-boat skirmishes on off days. Men in "the signals"--all rumour goes back to the signals in the end--had lively imaginations. We mourned the loss of Kut months before General Townshend was forced to surrender. We revelled in extracts from the private letters of people like the Brazilian ambassador in Berlin. We knew with absolute certainty the English regiments which were taking part in the defence of Verdun. The Guards, by a sudden move, seized the city of Lille, but owing to faulty staff work were cut off, hemmed in, and at last wiped out, the entire division. The last men, a mixed batch of Grenadiers, Coldstream, Scots, Irish, and Welsh, perished in a final glorious bayonet charge. It was a Guardsman who told me the story first, and he had it from what really was unimpeachable authority. But there is no reason for railing against Rumour. She is a wild-eyed jade, no doubt, with disordered locks and a babbling tongue. But life at a base in France would be duller without her; and she does no one any real harm. CHAPTER VII COMING AND GOING The camp in which I lived was the first in the series of camps which stretched along the whole winding valley. We were nearest to the entrance gates, at which military police were perpetually on guard; nearest to the railway station, a wayside _halte_ where few trains stopped; nearest to the road along which the trams ran into the town. All who came and went in and out passed by our camp, using a road, made, I think, by our men originally, which ran along the bottom of our parade ground and thence, with many side roads branching from it, through all the camps right along the valley. Our parade ground sloped down towards this road, ending in a steep bank which we tried to keep pleasantly grassy, which we crowned with flower-beds, so that new-comers might feel that they had arrived at a pleasant place.