We’ve waited and we’ve hoped—and many of the boys who hoped have died. We’ve heard that they were present at the great retreat before Cambrai in 1917. We’ve been told that they were coming by their thousands, but as yet we have seen none of them. Hun prisoners have consistently assured us that there were no Americans in France—that they were not coming. Now we are to see the Yanks with our own eyes. “Battery, eyes front. March to attention”—the order passes smartly down the column. We go by them, looking neither to left nor to right—so, after all, we can scarcely be said to have seen them. They are coloured troops—tremendous chaps with flashing teeth and rolling eyes. Our first Americans! We no longer remember the wire-entanglements, the gun-emplacements and the new trendi-systems which are being constructed by Chinamen so many miles back of the line. Our tails are up. We shan’t retreat. The Yanks are no longer coming. They have come. We know now whither we are marching—to the end of the war and to conquest. V THE village into which we inarched this morning is an old friend; we were billeted here earlier in the summer when we were withdrawn from the line for training. It consists of, perhaps, a hundred grey farmhouses clustered together in a willow-swamp. In the willow-groves nightingales were still singing when we entered. In the swamp the River Scarpe has its source. At this point it is so weak and narrow that a boy could leap across it; the village geese touch bottom as they breast its ripples; a brigade of artillery could drink it dry if all the horses were led down together. Here it is peaceful, but to the south of Arras it becomes sufficiently broad to give its name to the valley through which the Hun tried to drive last spring, when the waters of the Scarpe ran scarlet. The houses of the village stand at irregular intervals, divided from the road by a strip of common upon which geese graze. One reaches the common by little bridges which cross the Scarpe, which wanders singing, paralleling the highway. Nothing has been marred by shell-fire; the roar of the guns is so distant that it is seldom heard by day—only at night does their flash flicker momentarily, like the glow of a lantern carried between trees. It is a very quiet spot, well within the threatened area, where war is ignored and life has not altered its ways. Nature has conspired with the inhabitants in pretending that the world is unchanged. The gardens are fragrant with flowers; there are even more birds than formerly, for the refugee songsters from No Man’s Land have made these thickets their place of escape. The only terror that comes near to disturb them is the sullen explosion of bombs dropped at night from Hun planes, as is witnessed by raw scars in the greenness of the surrounding meadows.