I went straight up to the convoy at St. Omer, and had tea in the camp from which they had been shelled only a year before. This convoy of F.A.N.Y.s, to which many of my old friends had been transferred, was attached to the 2nd army, and had as its divisional sign a red herring. The explanation being that one day a certain general visited the camp, and on leaving said: "Oh, by the way, are you people 'army'?" "No," replied the F.A.N.Y., "not exactly." "Red Cross then?" "Well, not exactly. It's like this," she explained: "We work for the Red Cross and the cars are theirs, but we are attached to the second army; we draw our rations from the army and we're called F.A.N.Y.S." "'Pon my soul," he cried, "you're neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, but you're thundering good red herrings!" It was a foregone conclusion that a red herring should become their sign after that! The next day I was taken over the battlefields through Arcques, where the famous "Belle" still manipulates the bridge, and along by the Nieppe Forest. We could still see the trenches and dug-outs used in the fierce fighting there last year. A cemetery in a little clearing by the side of the road, the graves surmounted by plain wooden crosses, was the first of many we were to pass. Vieux Berquin, a once pretty little village, was reduced to ruins and the road we followed was pitted with shell holes. It was pathetic to see an old man and his wife, bent almost double with age and rheumatism, poking about among the ruins of their one-time home, in the hope of finding something undestroyed. They were living temporarily in a miserable little shanty roofed in by pieces of corrugated iron, the remains of former Nissen huts and dug-outs. In Neuf Berquin several families were living in new wooden huts the size of Armstrongs with cheerful red-tiled roofs, that seemed if possible to intensify the utter desolation of the surroundings. Lusty youths, still in the _bleu horizon_ of the French Army, were busy tilling the ground, which they had cleared of bricks and mortar, to make vegetable gardens. My chief impression was that France, now that the war was over, had made up her mind to set to and get going again just as fast as she possibly could. There was not an idle person to be seen, even the children were collecting bricks and slates. I wondered how these families got supplies and, as if in answer to my unspoken question, a baker's cart full of fresh brown loaves came bumping and jolting down the uneven village street. Silhouetted against the sky behind him was the gaunt wall of the one-time church tower, its windows looking like the empty sockets of a skull.