No time was lost in disembarkation. The men were marched across the railway lines to a train in waiting. Ginger, with Kenneth, Harry, and half a dozen more, got into a compartment labelled "Défense de fumer," and started lighting up at once. "We’ll defend it all right," said Ginger, "but the rest is spelt wrong." "It means you mustn’t smoke," said Kenneth. "Well, that’s a good ’un! What do they take us for? Any gentleman object?" "No!" yelled in chorus. "I didn’t half think so." The train rumbled away eastward, and the men scanned the bare country from the windows, remarking on its dreary character, scarcely relieved by the pollard willows that raised their naked boughs against the grey sky. By and by they got out at a small station, and marched along a straight road between rows of trees to a country village. They kept to the right side; the other was busy with empty supply wagons, lorries of familiar appearance, now and then a mud-caked motor car. Some officers had gone on ahead to arrange billets. Arriving at the village, the majority of the men were accommodated in the barn and outbuildings of a large farm, a few in separate cottages. Kenneth, with Harry and Ginger and other men of their platoon found themselves allotted to a labourer’s cottage, where shake-downs of clean straw had been laid on the floors of a couple of rooms. A road divided their billet from the garden of a good-sized house, in which quarters had been found for two or three of the officers. Apart from the traffic on the road there was as yet no sign of war. No sound of guns broke the stillness of the spring afternoon. But it had become known that the firing line was only a few miles ahead, and the men were all agog with expectation of an early call to the trenches. It soon appeared, however, that they were not yet to enter upon the real work of war. Rumour had it that Sir John French was waiting for further reinforcements before pursuing the forward movement recently started at Neuve Chapelle. Day after day passed in exercising, marching, practising operations in the field. Word came of other regiments pouring across the Channel and occupying other villages and towns behind the firing line. All day long they heard the distant bark of guns, and saw too frequently the swift passage of motor ambulances conveying their sad burdens to the coast. When off duty they strolled about the village, making friends of the hospitable villagers, romping with the children, playing football, cheerful, light-hearted, scarcely alive to the actualities of the desperate work in which they were so eager to engage.