The British Army has improved its acquaintance with the French tongue since those early days of the war. It has, indeed, contrived a kind of _lingua franca_ as a vehicle of speech between itself and its hosts in the billets. The vocabulary is small, being in the main restricted to articles of food and drink. Grammar is a negligible quality, and the accent varies from the clipped speech of North Britain to the broad burr of the West of England. The French being reputed a race which sets great store by politeness, _sivvoo-play_ is freely tacked on to all sentences in conversation with the natives. The difficulties of the modification of the definite article are simply abridged by prefixing to the substantive _doo_ (_du_). Thus, milk is _doolay_, bread _doopong_, water _doolo_, wine _doovang_. Jam, indispensable adjunct to all meals of our army in the field, has, as every schoolboy knows, no exact equivalent in French, for the simple reason that the French seldom eat jam except in the form of a kind of fruit jelly which they call _confiture_. But the British soldier never hesitated. The army slang for jam is, I believe, _poz_ or _pozzie_, so jam became _doopoz_, and was speedily recognized by the natives under that form. The peasants on their side have fallen into a kind of pigeon French, accompanied by a good deal of simple gesture, which, even with the most elementary vocabulary, is extremely easy to understand. As the population of the region of France abutting on the Belgian frontier speaks Flemish as well as French, the peasants in some parts of our line are able to draw on Flemish (which has many words resembling English) to supplement their vocabulary in talking with _les solgaires_, as they call them. The children, with childhood’s ready ear for languages, pick up English from our men extraordinarily fast. The ragged urchins who sell the London newspapers at G.H.Q. (General Headquarters) every evening have gathered quite a lot of English one way and another, though, I must say, some of their expressions savour very strongly of “our army in Flanders.” Our men, too, are very quick about French. On Sunday afternoons in the villages in the rear you may see Mr. Atkins going for a quiet stroll with his host in billets, some gnarled old peasant, and carrying on quite an animated conversation with him about the crops and what not. The mess orderlies at G.H.Q. are wonderful. On market-days they are to be seen in the Grand’ Place, baskets on their arms, haggling away as fluently as may be in French with the old women selling butter and eggs and fish and fruit.