‘I find it very difficult to love the French here. Even when we have been billeted in villages where no troops have been before, I have not met a single case of the hospitality that one meets among the peasants of other countries. It is worse than inhospitality here, for after all we are fighting for their dirty little lives. They suck enormous quantities of money out of us too. Calculate how much has flowed into the villages around Béthune, which for many months now have been continuously housing about a hundred thousand men. Apart from the money that they get paid directly as billeting allowance, there is the pay that the troops spend. Every private soldier gets his five-franc note (nearly four shillings) every ten days, and spends it on eggs, coffee, and beer in the local _estaminets_; the prices are ridiculous and the stuff bad. In the brewery at Béthune, the other day, I saw barrels of already thin beer being watered from the canal with a hose-pipe. The _estaminet_-keepers water it further.’ (The fortunes made in the war were consolidated after the Versailles Treaty, when every peasant in the devastated areas staked preposterous compensation claims for the loss of possessions that he had never had.) It was surprising that there were so few clashes between the British and French as there were. The Pas de Calais French hated us and were convinced that when the war was over we intended to stay and hold the Channel ports. It was impossible for us at the time to realize that it was all the same to the peasants whether they were on the German or the British side of the line—it was a foreign military occupation anyhow. They were not at all interested in the sacrifices that we were making for ‘their dirty little lives.’ Also, we were shocked at the severity of French national accountancy; when we were told, for instance, that every British hospital train, the locomotive and carriages of which had been imported from England, had to pay a £200 fee for use of the rails on each journey they made from railhead to base.