That brings us to the cold weather, of which we have had a foretaste. It was freezing a few days ago. The ground, the wash-taps, and we ourselves, all were frozen. A cheerful Wiltshireman passed along the highway. There was a bitter damp north wind; despite the frost everything seemed to be clammy. “Nice weather for you Canadians,” he shouted happily. Luckily we had no bayonets. It is quite natural that in this country it should be thought that Canadians love cold weather and welcome it. But there is cold and cold. The Salisbury Plains type is of the “and cold” variety! It steals in through the tent flaps with a “chilth” that damply clings. It rusts rifles, blues noses, hoarsens the voice, wheezes into the lungs. It catches on to the woollen filaments of blankets and runs into them, it seeks out the hidden gaps in canvas walls and steals within, it crawls beneath four blankets--when one has been able to steal an extra one--through overcoats, sweaters, up the legs of trousers, into under-garments, and at last finds gelid rest against the quivering flesh, eating its way into the marrow-bones. Like the enemy, it advances in massed formation, and though stoves may dissipate platoon after platoon it never ceases to send up reinforcements until a whining gale has seized on the tent-ropes, squeaks at the poles, draws in vain at the pegs, tears open loose flaps, and veering round brings back sodden rain and the perpetual, the everlasting mud. We know the hard, cold bite of “20 below,” the crisp snow, the echoing land, the crackling of splitting trees, even frost-bite. But it is a dry cold, and it comes: “Whish!” This cold of England’s creeps into the very heart. It takes mean advantages. “Give me the Yukon any old time,” says the hard-bitten shivering stalwart of the north-west. “This, this, it ain’t kinder playin’ the game.” It must not be thought that Canadians are complaining, for they are not. But England’s climate is to them something unknown and unspeakably vile! One must have been brought up in it to appreciate and to anticipate its vagaries. Canadians feel they have been misled. They expected English cold weather to be a “cinch.” But it’s the weather puts the “cinch” on, not they! There will come a time when we shall be in huts, and the leaky old canvas tents that are now our habitat will have been folded and--we hope for the benefit of others--stolen away! Those tents have seen so much service that they know just as well how to leak as an old charger how to drill. They become animated--even gay--when the wind-beaten rain darkens their grimy flanks, and with fiendish ingenuity they drip, drip, drip down the nape of the neck, well into the eye, even plumb down the throat of the open-mouthed, snoring son of the maple-land. No matter, we shall be old campaigners when the winter is over; old mud-larkers, as impervious to wet earth as a worm. Even the mud is good training for the time we shall have in the trenches! TENT MUSIC