I remember seeing a party of these cheery boys sitting down to a square meal one afternoon. They were still wearing their trench boots and fighting kit. They were on their way home from the front and they were hungry, especially hungry for cakes. There were four of them. "Mary"--they called all the girls Mary, the name of the shop invited that familiarity--brought them tea and a dish piled high with cakes, frothy meringues, pastry sandwiches with custard in the middle, highly ornamental sugary pieces of marzipan, all kinds of delicate confectionery. After the fare of the trenches these were dreams of delight, but not very satisfying. The dish was cleared. The spokesman, the French scholar of the party, demanded more. "Mary"--he did not translate the name into "Marie"--"_encore gateaux, au moins trois douzaine_." Mary, smiling, fetched another dish. I suppose she kept count. I did not, nor I am sure did the feasters. They finished those and repeated the encore. The _au moins trois douzaine_ was a ridiculous under-estimate of their requirements. It might have been multiplied by five. In the end there were no more _gateaux_. The stock was sold out. It was not a large shop and many others had drunk tea there that afternoon. The boys paid their bill and left, still astonishingly cheerful. I cannot remember whether the boat sailed that night or not. I hope it did. I hope the sea was rough. I should not like to think that those boys--the eldest of them cannot have been twenty-one--suffered from indigestion during their leave. Nothing but a stormy crossing would have saved them. If the spirit of the playing fields of our public schools won, as they say, our great-grandfathers' war, the spirit of the tuck shop is showing up in this one. The lessons learned as boys in those excellent institutions have been carried into France. Tea shops and restaurants at the bases, audacious _estaminets_ near the front, witness to the fact that we wage war with something of the spirit of schoolboys with pocket money to spend on "grub." Nobody will grudge our young officers their boyish taste for innocent feasts. It is a boys' war anyway. Everything big and bright in it, the victories we have won, the cheerfulness and the enduring and the daring, go to the credit of the young. It is the older men who have done the blundering and made the muddles, whenever there have been blundering and muddles. "Mary's Tea" was for officers. The men were invited to "English Soldiers' Coffee." It, too, was a tea shop and had a good position in one of the main streets of the town. But the name was not so well devised as Mary's Tea. It puzzled me for some time and left me wondering what special beverage was sold inside. I discovered at last that "Coffee" was a thoughtful translation of _Cafe_, a word which might have been supposed to puzzle an English soldier, though indeed very few French words puzzle him for long.