Our camp lay within two miles of Bulford village, a kind of Sleepy Hollow inhabited by a bovine-looking breed, whose mouths seemed intended for beer-drinking but not talking—which, in a way, was just as well, for when they did make a remark it was all Greek to us. We wakened the place up a bit, however, and the Canadians, who settled down to the tune of over five thousand round about us, nobly seconded our efforts, so I reckon the power of speech was restored to the villagers—after we left! For all I know they may be talking yet. Come to think it over in cold blood, they had cause to. Those Kanucks were a hefty lot, and blessed with real top-knotch powers of absorption. They were sports, too. We beat them at Rugby football, but they took their change back at soccer. Honours were even, I think, at drill, but they drank our canteen dry every night. You see, there were five thousand of them and only a little over two hundred of us. As they were inclined to talk a bit in their cups we were forced to mount an armed guard in the canteen. The guard's principal duty was to stop scrapping on the premises, and the first sign of "peeling" operations being indulged in was the signal to round up the mob. Once outside, however, they could do as they liked. And they generally did! Discoloured optics and flattened nasal appendages soon ceased to be objects of curiosity down our location. On the whole we got on well with them, and we had many things in common. Poor fellows, they got stuck into it cruelly in France, between German gas and overpowering numbers, but they showed real grit right through—just as we who had been camp-mates with them knew they would. Barring the heavy frosts, the rain, and the foot-deep mud, things weren't so bad in camp. The tucker was really good and there was plenty of it; the huts were, on the whole, fairly dry, although a bit draughty; and our kit was first-rate. We slept on the usual "donkey's breakfast," of course, but it isn't the worst bed to sleep on, by a long chalk. And it felt real good to me when the "Get-out-of-bed" bugle went every morning before sun-up, and the Kanuck band made the camp rounds to the tune of _John Peel_. How we cursed that band! Our daily work began with the usual before-breakfast breather—a brisk march over the hills, a spell of physical exercise, a pipe-opening "double," and then a free-and-easy tramp back to camp, soap-and-water, and breakfast. The feeds we used to take! I reckon the morning programme alone in the Army would fetch a double "lunger" back from the hearse door—if it didn't kill him outright. Dyspepsia disappeared from our camp, while as for stomachs, we grew to forget that such things formed part of our interior works—except when they reminded us in unmistakable terms that "Nature abhorred a vacuum."