I took up a little china dog, a bit of coarse French pottery, which some dead father had bought, at Poperinghe, perhaps, or Bailleul, for the children at home. Near by were "souvenirs"--bits of shell, of German equipment; then some leaves of a prayer-book, a neck-medallion of a saint--and so on--every fragment steeped in the poignancy of sudden death--death in youth, at the height of life. The boot and uniform sheds, where 500 French women and girls, under soldier-foremen, are busy, the harness-mending room, and the engineering workshops might reassure those pessimists among us--especially of my own sex--who think that the male is naturally and incorrigibly a wasteful animal. Colonel D. shows me the chart which is the record of his work, and its steadily mounting efficiency. He began work with 140 men, he is now employing more than a thousand, and his repairing sheds are saving thousands of pounds a week to the British Government. He makes all his own power, and has four or five powerful dynamos at work. We come out into a swirl of snow, and henceforward sightseeing is difficult. Yet we do our best to defy the weather. We tramp through the deepening snow of the great camp, which lines the slopes of the hills above the river and the town, visiting its huts and recreation-rooms, its Cinema theatre, and its stores, and taking tea with the Colonel of an Infantry Base Depot, who is to be our escort on the morrow. But on the last morning before we start we mount to the plateau above the reinforcement camp, where the snow lies deep and the wind blows one of the sharpest blasts of the winter. Here are bodies of men going through some of the last refinements of drill before they start for the front; here are trenches of all kinds and patterns, revetted in ways new and old, and planned according to the latest experience brought from the fighting line. The instructors here, as at other training-camps in France, are all men returned from the front. The men to whom they have to give the final touch of training--men so near themselves to the real thing--are impatient of any other sort. As we stand beside the trenches under the bright sun and piercing wind, looking at the dark lines of British soldiers on the snow, and listening to the explanations of a most keen and courteous officer, one's eyes wander, on the one side, over the great town and port, over the French coast and the distant sea, and on the other side, inland, over the beautiful French landscape with its farms and country houses. Everything one sees is steeped in history, a mingled history, in which England and France up to five centuries ago bore an almost equal share. Now again they are mingled here; all the old enmities buried in a comradeship that goes deeper far than they, a comradeship of the spirit that will surely mould the life of both nations for years to come.