I rode away from him, past the Coxyde encampment of his comrades. There they were as I had often seen them, with the peddlers cluttering their camp--candy men, banana women; a fringe of basket merchants about their grim barracks; a dozen peasants squatting with baskets of cigarettes, fruit, vegetables, foolish, bright trinkets. And over them bent the boys, dozens of them in blue blouses, stooping down to pick up trays, fingering red apples and shining charms, chaffing, dickering, shoving one another, the old loves of their childhood still tangled in their being. So when I am talking about the sailors as if they were heroes, suddenly something gay comes romping in. I see them again, as I have so often seen them in the dunes of Flanders, and what I see is a race of children. "Don't forget we are only little ones," they say. "We don't die; we are just at play." "ENCHANTED CIGARETTES" Where does the comfort of the trenches lie? What solace do the soldiers find for a weary life of unemployment and for sudden death? Of course, they find it in the age-old things that have always sufficed, or, if these things do not here altogether suffice, at least they help. For a certain few out of every hundred men, religion avails. Some of our dying men were glad of the last rites. Some wore their Catholic emblems. The quiet devout men continued faithful as they had been at home. Art is playing the true part it plays at all times of fundamental need. The men busy themselves with music, with carving, and drawing. Security and luxury destroy art, for it is no longer a necessity when a man is stuffed with foods, and his fat body whirled in hot compartments from point to point of a tame world. But when he tumbles in from a gusty night out of a trenchful of mud, with the patter from slivers of shell, then he turns to song and color, odd tricks with the knife, and the tales of an ancient adventure. After our group had brought food and clothing to a regiment, I remember the pride with which one of the privates presented to our head nurse a sculptured group, done in mud of the Yser.