If the Colonel had been a German officer he would probably have treated Ferette as the enemy had Romagny, by way of revenge and as an object-lesson in terrorism to the Alsatian villagers. There was nothing and no one to prevent him. He had the men and the guns and at a pinch could have improvised the fire-lighters which the Frenchman does not carry ready-made in his haversack, like the Boche. But that is not the French way. They fight like soldiers, not with women and children, and they do not wantonly destroy property. At the same time I am bound to say that just to show what the 75’s, though served by territorials, could do, they were allowed to fire one shot at the ruined castle which stands on one of the wooded heights above the town. The range was about three miles, the target was invisible to the gunners, the observation officer was perched in a tree three or four hundred yards from the battery, and yet the shell struck the wall exactly in the middle of the panel above the central window, making a neat little extra window, absolutely round, which was even an improvement on the original architect’s design. It was a trifling little incident, but it was very characteristic of the light-hearted boyish way in which the French set about the business of war. The nearer you get to the front the more that fact strikes you. Behind the armies, far away from the trenches, war is a dreary affair. The office-clerks, the road-menders, the men who guard canals and bridges and lines of communication, or are scattered about in little _postes_ of twenty or thirty, in ugly suburbs and out-of-the-way villages, and all the other hosts of soldiers (including most of the _embusqués_), who have never come face to face with an enemy, except, perhaps, a disarmed prisoner—these are the real unfortunates of the war. They only see its unpicturesque side, where if there is little danger there is also no glory and no excitement, and are apt to lose heart and take a gloomy view of its prospects. The optimists and the real light-hearted children of the nation are the fighting men who suffer its horrors and its hardships day and night, summer and winter, at the front. Their life, as was said shortly before his death by an Eton boy and gallant English soldier, is a glorified picnic—a picnic with an object. They live the open-air existence, which is the proper environment of the natural man. It is better fun to ride and march through the night to Ferette, with a chance of a scrap with the Boches at the end of it, than to put on a stiff collar and hard hat to crawl to a stuffy office day after day in a crowded suburban train. It is better fun, as well as a more dignified calling, to be a soldier fighting your country’s battles than a waiter or a flunkey or a billiard-marker or a rich idler with no real work to do. That is how the French soldier at the front takes the war, in spite of its hardships and sufferings and