I gathered that the three young girls were daughters of the house; I also noted that _trois gracieuses jeunes filles_ was doubly underlined. One of our servants used to be a professional gardener, and in a couple of days he had weeded the paths and brought skill and knowledge to bear on the neglected vegetable beds. We had excellent salad from that garden and fresh strawberries, while there were roses to spare for the tall vases on the mantelpiece in the mess; and before we came away our gardener had looked to the future and planted lettuce and turnips and leeks, and even English pansies. The Boche gunners never got a line on to that house, and though aeroplanes cruised above us every night not a single bomb dropped near. The town major, a learned and discursive subaltern, relieved on account of rheumatic troubles from more strenuous duties with an Infantry regiment, joined our mess and proved a valuable addition. He was a talented mathematician whose researches had carried him to where mathematics soar into the realms of imagination; he had a horror of misplaced relatives, and possessed a reliable palate in the matter of red wines. One dinner-time he talked himself out on the possibilities of the metric system, and pictured the effects of a right angle with a hundred instead of ninety degrees. Another night he walked me up and down the garden until 2 A.M., expatiating on astronomy. He tried to make me realise the beyond comprehension remoteness of the new star by explaining that astronomers did not calculate its distance from the earth in thousands of miles. "Light travels at 186,000 miles a second; to astronomers the new star is 2000 years away," he concluded. As I have said, he was a valuable addition to our mess. One day he took me to a neighbouring village and introduced me to a fat comfortable-looking Maire, who spread his hands on his capacious knees and invited us to try a cooling nip of absinthe. After which he produced from a small choice store a bottle of fifty-year-old brandy, and made the town major take it away in token of a friendship that began in the way-back days of 1915. All this may not sound like war, but I am trying to write down some of the average daily happenings in a field-artillery brigade that has seen as much service as any brigade in the new armies.