“It ain’t a paper,” said another. “It’s the States--he’s a Yank!” The War Office put it on the American cousin’s arm, and wherever it goes it seems welcome. It may puzzle the gunners when the American says, “That was a peach of a shot, right across the pan!” or the infantry when he says, “It cuts no ice!” and there is no ice visible in Flanders; he speaks about typhoid to the medical corps which calls it enteric; and “fly-swatting” is a new word to the sanitarians, who are none the less busily engaged in that noble art. Lessons for the British in the “American language” while you wait! In return, the American is learning what a “stout-hearted thruster” and other phrases mean in the Simon-pure English. The correspondents are the spoiled spectators of the army’s work; the itinerants of the road of war. Nobody sees so much as we, because we have nothing to do but to see. An officer looking at the towers of Ypres cathedral, a mile away from the trench where he was, said: “No, I’ve never been in Ypres. Our regiment has not been stationed in that part of the line.” We have sampled all the trenches; we have studied the ruins of Ypres with an archæologist’s eye; we know the names of the estaminets of the villages, from “The Good Farmer” to “The Harvester’s Rest” and “The Good Cousin,” not to mention “The Omnibus Stop” on the Cassell Hill. Madame who keeps the hotel in the G. H. Q. town knows me so well that we wave hands to each other as I pass the door; and the clerks in a certain shop have learned that the American likes his fruit raw, instead of stewed in the English fashion, and plenty of it, especially if it comes from the South out of season, as it does from Florida or California to pampered human beings at home, who, if they could see as much of this war as I have seen, would appreciate what a fortunate lot they are to have not a ribbon of salt water but a broad sea full of it, and the British navy, too, between them and the thing on the other side of the zone of death. G. H. Q. means General Headquarters, and B. E. F., which shows the way for your letters from England, means British Expeditionary Force. The high leading, the brains, of the army are theoretically at G. H. Q. That word theoretically is used advisedly in view of opinion at other points. An officer sent from G. H. Q. to command a brigade had not been long out before he began to talk about those confounded one-thing-and-another fellows at G. H. Q. When he was at G. H. Q., he used to talk about those confounded one-thing-and-another fellows who commanded corps, divisions, and brigades at the front. The philosophers of G. H. Q. smiled and the philosophers of the army smiled--it was the old story of the staff and the line; of the main office and the branches. But the line did the most smiling to see the new brigadier getting a taste of his own medicine.