A good many of us had to carry a seven-pound tin of bully beef in addition to our heavy packs and a great many rounds of ammunition. In the fearfully hot weather we could not carry all this weight, and the tins of beef had to go. We should have been thankful for them later on, when we ran short and some of the beef we had with us had gone bad through the tins getting punctured, which happened in all sorts of strange ways, including bullet-holes and bayonet pricks. But these were things that couldn’t be helped, and in spite of them all we kept very cheerful, and often enough, both on the march and in the trenches and French forts, when we got to them, we sang and joked and whistled as if there was no such thing going on as war. Our officers shared everything with us, and suffered just as we did, though often worse, so that whenever we got a bit downhearted, their example cheered us up and put us right. I don’t think there’s a man who’s fought in this great war who won’t say the same thing about his officers. We had so much fierce fighting when the work really began, and saw so many strange and dreadful things, that it is not easy to say what stands out most clearly in our minds in such a business, but one of the things I do remember, and shall never forget, is the week or so we spent in one of the big French forts at Lille, fighting side by side with French soldiers. I will tell you about that later, but we did a lot before we got to Lille. When we were on the march we had a great deal of exciting work to do in hunting Germans. Small bodies of them were everywhere, apart from the immense numbers of spies who were in the Lille district and elsewhere. The French bagged a lot of spies and gave them short shrift. They hid in all sorts of queer places--some of them got into the tall mill chimneys--but they were routed out and shot. We found a fair lot of Germans in houses and farms when we were on the march. We examined these places thoroughly. When we arrived at farmhouses and suchlike places, a non-commissioned officer, with a small party of men would make inquiries, often with the help of French cavalrymen who were with us and could speak English, and we always found that threats of fearful punishment to the womenfolk had been made by the Germans if they told us that any Germans had been seen about. But the women told us readily enough, especially when there happened to be any Germans in hiding--those who were too drunk to get away and had been left behind. It didn’t take long to make these fellows prisoners, and they rubbed their eyes a lot when they got sober and found that the British had bagged them--though I fancy that most of them were glad to be caught and out of the fighting.