In its summer dress Flanders indeed is very fair. Behind the firing-line the wind and the birds have done the work of man. The fields are all asway with wheat and barley and oats, sprung up of themselves, splashed with great stains of scarlet and blue where poppies and cornflowers nod in the breeze. Nature has scattered with a liberal hand these most English of flowers, suggestive of all that is most beautiful in the English countryside, wherever the sappers’ pick has thrown up the clods of earth, be it from a trench, be it from a grave. In the little gardens about the shattered homesteads, where abandoned equipment, ends of hospital dressings, scattered cartridges, and empty ammunition boxes tell of the war that has passed that way, the scarlet ramblers still scramble with flaming petals athwart the blasted walls, in and out of the empty window-frames. The red roofs of the farms nestling in masses of swaying greenery, the roses in the village gardens, the blooming hedgerows--all this is the beauty of summer England, surest cure for home-sickness and ennui. Very wisely the military authorities out here have always encouraged the playing of games by the men in their periods of recreation. They have recognized that games keep the men physically fit, and also take their minds off the dangers and hardships of their life at the front. Games keep the men from brooding over the perils they have escaped as over the dangers that may stand before. Games keep them out of mischief, from loafing about the villages and clandestine drinking, which so often leads to unreflected acts. It is in no spirit of frivolity, but in the spirit of the old maxim, “_Mens sana in corpore sano_,” that our men while away their leisure hours with cricket and football and sing-songs. I am anxious to reaffirm this, to all Englishmen, self-evident truth because (there is no object in cloaking the matter) the French have shown at times a tendency to be scandalized at the recreations of our army in the field. As time has gone on, and they have come to know us even better than before, they have begun to understand that the Englishman, in taking his games with him into the field of war, is only carrying on our great system of national hygiene which has turned out all our great fighters of history from Francis Drake to the Grenfells. Therefore, fair weather or foul, our army in the field contrives to amuse itself in its leisure hours, sparse though they may be. In winter it played football. The ground was always rough, and sometimes pitted with shell-holes. Four of the black and white posts which the signallers use for laying their field telegraph wires served as goal. But the ball was tight and firm, blown up by some kindly A.S.C. driver with his tyre-pump, the players were hard and keen. I have seen many a good game played not a mile behind the firing-line, always liable to be disturbed by sporadic outbursts of German “frightfulness.” [Illustration: _“Daily Mail” phot._