The beautiful La Bouille is the objective of most passengers. _Untrammelled_ is the word for this little town. The women are fresh; the men are simple; the houses straggle quaintly and cleanly along the front; and the white walls and the gables climb in an unsophisticated fashion up the wooded hills beside the white, winding road. There is a _Place_ set out by the landing-stage, lined with cafés under the trees. The river-men in their wide _pantalons_ and loose corduroy blouses sip wine with their women; their children romp in the centre of the square. You will be nobly entertained if you do no more than sit there and call for refreshment to the red-cheeked waitress. But you will probably not be content without wandering up the hill-road after an hour at the tables. And if you do not grow envious of the youths who sit on the bank with company by that road-side, you are more than human. In Normandy love-making there is nothing embarrassed, but an unforced give and take that is not traditionally reputed to lie along the path of true love. Whether this is true love or not (and it probably isn't), it looks quite as delicious, and it sufficeth them. One wonders whether, after all, they are due to demand much more. The girl looks at you frankly from the midst of it, as who should say: "And why do not you, in this land of sweet sunlight, fulfil, too, the law of your existence?" From almost every house, as you ascend, some houri smiles a half-welcome at you and would not be greatly confused or displeased if you took it for a whole, and, entering, made yourself at home. At the hilltop you'll come on the old _Maison brûlée_, with a café in the recess, and much merry company. If you stay there as long as you want to, you'll miss the last boat to Rouen. So you quit drinking-in the Seine beauty revelling below you up and down the river basin, and saunter back to the steamer. All the town is there to see her leave. Everyone smiles and "waves" and says _Come again_ in no uncertain pantomime. And all the journey back in the soft evening you say you will. SECTION B.--PICARDY AND THE SOMME CHAPTER I BEHIND THE LINES--I The road between ---- and ---- is a fearful and wonderful place in the swift-closing winter evening. The early winter rains are drifting gustily across it. The last of the autumn leaves are whirling away. The far western valley is a gulf of mist; the rain-squalls wash about its slopes. The road beneath you, between its low flanks, is a channel of mobile black slush, too far churned for striation. Ever since the rains began, two weeks ago, there has been a traffic on it that is continuous--a traffic that has had to be directed and disentangled at innumerable stages along its length. So the road surface (it washes over a solid foundation) is a squirting slime.