"The English? Oh, they're good fellows!" remarked a villager in whose house a number of the allies of France were quartered. "They're in bed snoring every night at eight. They get together in my kitchen while I make their tea and sing sentimental songs. They're all musical." The journalist adds, in corroboration of this statement, that he himself heard Tommies "singing discordantly to the accompaniment of the cannon." Also he found that Tommy had a sense of humor. On one occasion, he learned, a German officer came charging at the head of his men into an English trench. Leaping over the edge of it, he fell headlong into a sea of black mud, from which he picked himself up, black and dripping, and exclaimed: "What a confounded nuisance this old war is, isn't it?" Whereupon a Tommy, about to run his bayonet through the intruder, burst into roars of laughter, and made him a prisoner instead. "And the Tommies are philosophers, too," writes the Frenchman. "I heard one of them say solemnly to a comrade: 'If you have any money, spend it all to-day. You may be dead to-morrow!'" ONE YOUNG SOLDIER WHO PROVED A HERO. "Jean Berger, 'simple soldat' of the Second Regiment of Infantry, should, after the war, be Jean Berger, V. C. He is a Frenchman--yes; but listen to this story: "He, a boy of about eighteen years of age, lies in hospital here, wounded badly, but not dangerously, in the side and also in the hand. "Jean belongs to an old Alsatian family. After the war against Prussia, his grandfather refused to submit to the rule of the conquerors, and left the province to settle in Normandy. He passed his hatred of the Prussians on to his son, and the son instilled it in the four grandchildren. "When war broke out, two of the sons were already in the army, one as an officer, and the father, calling to him the two boys who were not yet of age to be called upon by the military authorities, said to them: 'Go and enlist! And be sure to join regiments which will operate on the Alsatian frontier.' "Jean joined the Second Regiment of Infantry, which was soon under orders for Upper Alsace. Before it arrived at the scene of operations, however, fresh instructions were received, and the Second went to operate with the English on the left. He went through the terrible ordeal of the battle of the Marne, and, with his regiment, now sadly diminished in numbers, but with its dash and spirit as of old, he formed one of the stupendous line drawn up to face the Germans in their tremendously strong positions on the Aisne.