I was rather a favourite of hers, and she assured me if I wished to watch him arriving it would give her great pleasure to hide me in her paying-desk place where I could see everything clearly. She was quite hurt when I refused the invitation. He was tremendously popular with the French people; and the next time I saw her she rushed up to me and said: "How your Prince is beautiful, Mees; what spirit, what fire! Believe me, they broke every glass they used at that dinner, and then the Prince demanded of me the bill and paid for everything." (Some lad!) "He also wrote his name in my autograph book," she added proudly. "Oh he is _chic_, that one there, I tell you!" One warm summer day Gutsie and I were sitting on a grassy knoll, just beyond our camp overlooking the sea (well within earshot of the summoning whistle), watching a specially large merchant ship come in. Except for the distant booming of the guns (that had now become such a background to existence we never noticed it till it stopped), an atmosphere of peace and drowsiness reigned over everything. The ship was just nearing the jetty preparatory to entering the harbour when a dull reverberating roar broke the summer stillness, the banks we were on fairly shook, and there before our eyes, out of the sea, rose a dense black cloud of smoke 50 feet high that totally obscured the ship from sight for a moment. When the black fumes sank down, there, where a whole vessel had been a moment before, was only half a ship! We rubbed our eyes incredulously. It had all happened so suddenly it might have taken place on a Cinema. She had, of course, struck a German mine, and quick as lightning two long, lithe, grey bodies (French destroyers) shot out from the port and took off what survivors were left. Contrary to expectation she did not sink, but settled down, and remained afloat till she was towed in later in the day. A "Y.M.C.A." article on "Women's work in France," that appeared in a Magazine at home, was sent out to one of the girls. The paragraph relating to us ran:-- "Then there are the 'F.A.N.N.I.E.S.,' the dear mud-besplashing F.A.N.Y.s. (to judge from the language of the sometime bespattered, the adjective was not always 'dear'), with them cheeriness is almost a cult; at 6 a.m. in the morning you may always be sure of a smile, even when their sleep for the week has only averaged five hours per night."