It is almost impossible to get the names of their places of past adventure from the soldiers. The French names, if ever heard, are soon forgotten. It is exciting to them even to hear that they are near Paris. They date from "where So-and-so got hit," or "where we got those fags from a hofficer," or where "the women ran out to give us drinks as we rode by." Very often the name survives as a mysterious village called "Ralentir." (Visitors to France may remember that this is the big notice put up outside villages, the "Drive slowly" warning to motorists.) It was curious to recall, as I looked north later in the day towards Vic-sur-Aisne, that I got almost as far as this a fortnight ago, after the German retreat from Meaux, thinking I was well behind our armies, and found and smoked in, their line of abandoned trenches, in the company of two incursious peasants. The Germans were even then making their huge entrenchments on the hills ahead, and it was to cost a fortnight's fearful fighting before our men made good their position on my seemingly lonely slope of fields. We were "requisitioned" again, to run to Mont St. Marc. As I looked across at the Forest of Laigue, I knew now that the check that turned me back in those woods last week, after swimming the Oise, was one of the violent counter-attacks by the Germans; when they ventured, as they rarely have done, to charge with the bayonet. On that same day, the bombardment which I heard from the direction of Lassigny, proves now to have been the beginning of the French resistance to the German advance in that quarter against General Castelnau. At Crepy, on the return, a Turco, whom I must have met at the fierce skirmish south-east of Peronne, recognised me as he lay, a strange figure white with loss of blood under his African tan, his turban and brilliant uniform bloodstained, waiting to be moved into an ambulance car. "Ah, they got me for a time, not long"--it was odd French--"but I assisted two with that, first (the bayonet), and then there remained to me these" (a significant gesture of the hands). A badly-wounded north countryman, who lay beside him, with a nurse temporarily bandaging his shoulder--another shrapnel wound; they are nearly all shrapnel wounds--evidently understand the gesture, if not the lingo. "Fine chaps at a scrap, the darkies. It's funny, though, I couldn't use hands like that; sort of claws fashion. Now I could go on with a fist--this way--all day; just smash them. Some difference in education, d'you think? Or just natural?" The nurse stopped the speculative opening. But think of it; in the surroundings! Our undefeated British soldier, tolerant of the individual, critical of the "foreign ways," ready to argue an abstraction, to fight, to make or be turned into a joke, even while every breath was a painful effort. Thursday.