"They have come a long way down the straight roads between the hills, and there is dust in their eyes and throats, and they have arrived at that moment in the march when the pack weighs heaviest, when the shoulder-straps begin to rub, when the rifle seems to wear a hole in the shoulder, and when the shoe begins to pinch. The best-hearted man in the regiment knows that it is the time for a little joke. He begins to speak about his captain, who is walking a yard away from him. 'Our captain grows a little fat, I think, my little ones.' 'Yes,' says a comrade, taking up the joke; 'it is possible that he has been eating too much.' 'And he has a great thirst, I am told,' says a third man. 'It is marvellous what a thirst our captain has! Three bottles of red wine are hardly enough to wet his throat.' 'He gets too old for war;' and so the joke goes on, every word of which is heard by the captain, who finally bursts into laughter, and says, 'You are impudent rascals, all of you.' The bad moment has passed. The weight of the pack is forgotten, and presently the baritone of the regiment sings the first line of a marching song. The chorus goes lilting down the long white road between the poplar sentinels." * * * * * Few stories have appeared with reference to the fighting round La Bassée. A dispatch rider says: "There was one brigade there that had a past. It had fought at Mons[49] and Le Cateau,[50] and then plugged away cheerfully through the Retreat and the Advance. What was left of it had fought stiffly on the Aisne. Some hard marching, a train journey, more hard marching, and it was thrown into action at La Bassée. There it fought itself to a standstill. It was attacked and attacked until, shattered, it was driven back one wild night. It was rallied, and, turning on the enemy, held them. More hard fighting, a couple of days' rest, and it staggered into action at Ypres, and somehow--no one knows how--it held its bit of line. A brigade called by the same name, consisting of the same regiments, commanded by the same general, but containing scarce a man of those who had come out in August, marched very proudly away from Ypres, and went--not to rest, but to hold another bit of the line. "And this brigade was not the Guards' Brigade. There were no picked men in the brigade. It contained just four ordinary regiments of the line--the Norfolks, the Bedfords, the Cheshires, and the Dorsets. What the 15th Brigade did other brigades have done." * * * * *