Their officer addressed them shortly, an N.C.O. beside him with a lantern, and another with a handful of envelopes and a bundle of cardboard boxes. The wagons, said the officer, would go to Refilling Point, load, march together from there and rejoin the Division at their new camp, separate there, and each take their rations to their own units. And because he might not see them together again that day he had paraded them then to wish them a happy Christmas and good luck, and to give them a little present that had been sent out to every man in the Expeditionary Force. One by one the men received a photograph of the King and Queen with a message written on the back, and a brass tobacco-box containing tobacco and cigarettes and the Christmas wishes of Princess Mary. ‘Bloomin’ ’andsome,’ said one driver admiringly. ‘I’m goin’ to send mine ’ome to be kep’ for me. There’ll be bags o’ new troops out ’ere in the spring, but we’ll allus ’ave these to show we was out wi’ the first crush.’ ‘My dad’s got ’is Queen’s chocolate box yet that she gave the first lot out in S’th Africa,’ said Driver Ruff. ‘I’ll be upsides with ’im now.’ ‘I been thinkin’ this week past,’ said a third, ‘that I never knew anythin’ less like Christmas comin’. It seems more like it now somehow.’ And so ‘somehow’ it did. One might hardly expect a handful of men, turned out in the raw cold small hours of a winter morning, standing in mud over their boots, with a long weary day’s work and a bare half night’s uncomfortable sleep behind them, and another wet and weary day ahead, to rise with any enthusiasm to a call for ‘three cheers for the King and Queen.’ But they did it, the ‘H’ray’ leaping eagerly and cheerfully close on the last sound of the word, of the officer’s ‘Hip-hip-hip⸺.’ And Driver Ruff’s was the first and loudest and gayest voice of the lot. INTO GERMANY ON THE EVE OF WAR. BY W. E. DE B. WHITTAKER.