One of the British Tommies gave me a bit of brief but sound philosophy on ducking: "If you 'ear them, they won't 'urt you; if you don't 'ear them, you're dead." A little later on a bit of Irish humor was tragically mingled with ducking. A shell was coming, as an Irish soldier thought, straight for him, and he ducked, and the shell swept away the head of the man behind him. Said Paddy, "Shure it always pays to be polite." By and by we were halted and lead through a kind of tunnel into a barn. Here were a bunch of British, most of them having taken part in the Mons retirement. We found we were to act as a reserve with these men, that is, in case of attack we would make our way to the front line as quickly as possible. A trench led from both sides of this barn, but it was so skilfully concealed that no one would have dreamt of its being there. In this barn the Tommies had made themselves very comfortable, having straw to lie on, and fires with which to boil tea. We soon were great friends with the regulars, who gave us many valuable tips for active service. We stayed here for twenty-four hours, the only excitement being a German shell dropped in the separator of an antiquated threshing machine, some two hundred yards to our rear, and the way those thresher men bolted makes me think that they are probably running yet. The natives at that time farmed away, just about five hundred yards from the firing line, as if nothing was out of the ordinary. I saw them finishing land in one part of a small field, while shrapnel was spraying the other part, and at that time a family was living in every house around there. Since then, however, both they and the town of Armentieres are just dust heaps, being shelled to a finish at about the same time as the great bombardment of Ypres. At nightfall we trudged silently from the barn and without any casualties succeeded in reaching our hospitable _estaminet_. The good lady of the house, after counting us over, prepared hot coffee for us. In this town is the French and Belgian burial ground and at that time it was full of statuary; even the humblest grave had its own little shrine above it. The monuments were very fine, particularly a huge marble one which had been erected by the sons of Armentieres for those who had died for _La Patrie_, at Quatre Bras, Algiers, the Crimea and the war of 1870. It was a beautiful monument, some thirty feet high, and could not possibly be of any advantage to either side, yet the Germans, a few weeks afterwards, shelled this graveyard, utterly destroying all the beautiful monuments and exhuming piecemeal dozens of bodies.