When up in the Ypres salient one day I ran across an old friend in the person of the C.O. of the 16th Lancers. He and his officers were living in dug-outs constructed in the grounds of a ruined country house. I reminded him that the last time I had seen him had been in the very handsome dining-room of the 16th Lancers mess at The Curragh. Then he was wearing the red and gold mess-kit of “The Scarlet Lancers.” Now he was in the worn and stained khaki, plastered with mud from top to toe, with a disreputable old cap with ear-pieces and monstrously heavy boots. “Perhaps you’d care to have a look at our mess here,” he said, and pointed at a black hole in a mud-bank a few feet away. Outside some facetious orderly had affixed a notice-board inscribed “Hotel Ritz,” with various light-hearted remarks to the effect that it was licensed for the sale of beer and wines to be consumed on the premises. This dug-out was what it purported to be, a hole in the ground, muddy and damp and depressing. At the back several sleeping-valises lay on the ground. There was an elegant table and some chairs, white-enamelled, with turned legs. “The table’s got a marble top,” said a sad-looking Major sitting there, “like the tables at the Carlton!” I have visited troops in their billets in every part of our line. I have been to headquarters installed in fine old châteaux, with which I deal in a subsequent chapter; I have lunched with Brigadiers quartered in hovels so mean and filthy that they would disgrace the lowliest cabin of the West of Ireland; I have sat and chatted with sappers living in holes scraped out of the sides of a bank like kingfishers’ nests; I have seen our soldiers living in wooden hutments and under canvas; I have seen them in grubby little workmen’s cottages in suburbs of the industrial towns of the North of France and in dreary, rambling old French barracks. Sometimes they were comfortable (and the British soldier is able to make himself comfortable on astonishingly little!); generally they were uncomfortable. But they never grumbled at their rough lot. They groused about their inaction and bemoaned their hard fate at not being able to “get a crack at the Germs.” By no single word, however, did they indicate that they regarded their conditions of life as anything exceptional, anything outside the great game in which they are engaged. The army does its best for them. Their food is plentiful, extraordinarily varied, seeing the difficulties of transport, and absolutely regular in every part of the line. The army gives them, amongst other things, cigarettes and tobacco and matches and newspapers. As my Hussar said, the A.S.C. does not run to “stewed apples and custard.” It cannot give them houses always; it cannot give them family life; it cannot protect them against the dark angel that stalks these Flanders flats by day and night. But it smooths things as best it can, and for the rest the cheerful philosophy of the British soldier “carries on.”