Puck, in his most mischievous mood, never conceived anything more glaringly inappropriate than the British soldier in billets in France. Probably no greater contrast could be found than, on the one hand, the French peasant, working from daybreak to nightfall, scraping and stinting and saving to realize a profit where he can, to add a franc or two to his _bas de laine_, and, on the other, the British soldier--who receives about the same wage as a farm-hand in this part of France, unless he is in the Mechanical Transport, when with 6s. a day he is far better paid than the curé or the village schoolmaster--wasteful, liberal-handed, as thriftless about money as he is about food. Without warning the two are flung together. Suddenly they are called upon to live together on a footing of the utmost intimacy. To know a man you must live with him. That is how the North of France has got to know the British soldier. After making due allowance for English madness--_spleen_, the French call it--the peasant has discovered the British soldier to be the most easy-going of lodgers, whose liberal allowances in the matter of rations and broad ideas about money enable all manner of small transactions to be arranged of advantage to the host and his cronies in the village, who is always ready to do odd jobs about the house, who is a kind of nurse to the children, who is, in short, the best of fellows imaginable. This is all to the credit side. On the debit side there is the British soldier’s unaccountable and inexplicable mania for washing himself, requiring quantities of clean cold water that appear positively incredible in comparison with the small jugful which suffices for the ablutions of the host and his entire family. The German comic (God save the mark!) press loves to portray the “savage” British soldier “preying” on the North of France, to the despair of the unfortunate French peasant, abandoned to the clutches of the wicked English by an unscrupulous Government of Paris Chauvinists. In reality the “unfortunate” French peasant in these parts is living on British rations, and making more money than ever before in his life. In all the villages about our line the boys and girls of all ages are wearing British Army badges. I met a cowherd once who was wearing a most unmistakable pair of British khaki riding-breeches. I lunched one day at an hotel in a town in our zone where British ration bread was served at the _table d’hôte_. The hostess noticed the query in my eye, and hastened to explain: “_C’est un officier anglais qui loge chez nous et qui demande, comme ça, que l’on lui sert de son pain à lui._” That might pass for the bread, but the soft sugar had specks of black in it, those flakes of tea which you will always find in British ration sugar. I said no more, but paid without a murmur three francs for the worst meal I have ever eaten in France. [Illustration: _Underwood & Underwood phot._