Still the old Army of 1914 marches on. When it entered Bailleul all was calm. Its great red-brick houses stood fairly and uncracked. The people had had a fright, but they held on. They held on through years of the war, and though the guns kept pounding away at them they did not wholly abandon it till 1918 when the Germans seized the town as part fruit of their second great Spring attempt to end the war. Then it was "fort abimée." The owners all fled, and what they left an enemy army ransacked. Thousands of officers and men were snugly billeted in November 1914 at Locre and Bailleul and Meteren. Sir John French came and chatted with men in the billets--about the battle of Ypres. New drafts came out from England. There had been a clearance of reservists and first volunteers. Each stricken battalion received its half a thousand to make up. Practically new units were organised for the winter defence of the new lines, and when the time was come they marched three leagues nearer to their enemy--to Sailly sur la Lys and Laventie and Neuf Berquin, Estaires--such names of destiny! When the King came to Sailly sur la Lys at the end of November he could not see his guardsmen because they were already in the fighting line and it was thought it would be unsoldierly to call them back for the King to see, to which the King agreed. The flowers are withered, the thistles which gave their fragrance to the air at Ypres are white with down. Peasants everywhere are scything weeds and burning them in smoking heaps. But the trenches beyond Sailly are still shaggy-topped with teazle crowns and woolly nettle heads. One wonders how many different units at what different times occupied those 1914 trenches. Here still, one picks up old blue water-bottles and faded green straps and pouches of British uniforms. They are poor trenches--the mere staves that lined them to keep up the mud are all warped and good dug-outs are few.