To go up the road from here to the firing-line is a great experience. You see, as you pass along, all the multifarious items of army organisation--long lines of lorries, horsed-wagons, limbers, guns, columns of marching men, motor-cars by the score, French soldiers, British soldiers, aeroplanes spinning merrily overhead--truly a wonderful spectacle. You have no conception of the abominable state of the main roads out here. The _pave_ road, peculiar to these parts, is always a bone-shaker at the best of times, but now, after the passage of so much heavy traffic, it is simply appalling. A curious feature is the extraordinary straightness of the main roads, down which you can literally see for miles. The by-roads, on the other hand, seem to abound in right-angled turns, and it is not an easy matter to drive a car along at any considerable rate of speed. My knowledge of French has come in very useful indeed, but for these outlying country districts a knowledge of Flemish would be even more valuable. Many persons about here speak not one word of French, and Flemish is almost always used by the people _en famille_. It is a kind of mixture of low German and middle English. I can usually get at people's meanings, and even make them understand mine, by a jargon embracing sometimes words from Chaucer and sometimes a little German. Listening to the language when spoken one is reminded of rather nasal Welsh. There is a distinct resemblance between the general sound of Welsh and Flemish in conversation.