Again, I remember calling at a château to get a pass to visit a certain part of our line. It was a hybrid kind of place. The old part of the château had been caught up and surrounded, as it were, in an imposing pile of new red brick. On the lawn in front ran a lean fragment of old grey wall, along which the scarlet rambler climbed recklessly, profusely, in and out of the castellated coping and athwart a broken arch. Two motor-cyclist despatch-riders sat on the lawn beneath a giant walnut-tree and tinkered with their cycles. In the distance the guns drummed gently, continuously. A young man came strolling across the lawn. He was an officer. His khaki tunic and breeches and puttees had seen hard service, his cap was thrust back from his forehead. In his hand he carried a sheaf of papers, with which he returned, rather punctiliously, the salute of the two motorcyclists. As he passed me I saw it was the Prince of Wales. He passed into my vision briefly that day and passed out again, very slim, still a little diffident, in the pink of condition, as he passes to and fro in the midst of our army in the field, restless when he is held back too long from the front, happy only when he feels that he is sharing the dangers and hardships of the army. The Prince of Wales with the army in France! What a fine suggestion there is about the phrase! It kindles my imagination every time I see him there with the troops. Possibly the grey old tower of that modernized château which watched him strolling nonchalantly across the grass that morning had also looked down upon his most famous ancestor, him whose sable armour, once famed in France, you may see to this day in the Cathedral at Canterbury. This region is rich in association with our fighting past. I spent a morning once with a Headquarters Staff in a château where Marlborough (who has left the impress of his magnetic personality so deeply stamped on the French imagination) had stayed when he was conducting his operations against Marshal Villar’s famous _Ne Plus Ultra_ lines. A quiet, reposeful spot was that château, with a rococo atmosphere, with panelled rooms and old furniture, and gold-framed portraits of military men of a past age. In a little study on the ground-floor, where “Corporal John” may have worked himself, a General explained to me over a table spread with maps his hopes and ambitions for the coming summer. Outside a Staff Officer was explaining the working of a trench mortar, the invention of one of the officers quartered in the château; others were talking of the fishing they had managed to get in the neighbourhood. Mortars and fishing! As subjects of conversation they were as topical in the times of “the army in Flanders” as to-day.