Occasionally, on the other hand, the châtelain--in the case I have in mind it was a châtelaine--is irreconcilably disagreeable. The lady in this case was married, and her husband, having been mobilized, was serving somewhere in the French firing-line. This circumstance had fired her indignation. With woman’s sweet unreasonableness, she laid it down that soldiers who were not in the firing-line were a good-for-nothing pack of ne’er-do-wells, and if they expected to have a nice comfortable time in her château, she would show them that they were vastly mistaken. So this preposterous person would visit the house several times a day--she lived herself in another house close by--ferret about for any damage done, and generally make herself an unmitigated nuisance. The gardener actually had instructions, which he carefully observed, to lop off the heads of every flower in the grounds to prevent the British officers from plucking them for their rooms. The General quartered there might have had the woman promptly packed off about her business by saying a word to the French Military Mission at General Headquarters. He was, however, much too polite to do that, so the lady was suffered in silence, and only scolded behind her back. This case, which I have only mentioned because it is amusing, and not because it is typical, is quite exceptional. In the main, the relations between our army and its French hosts have been admirable. There has been a maximum of consideration on the one hand, a maximum of grateful hospitality on the other. In years to come the memories that will linger about these old châteaux of those who gratefully accepted their hospitality will be of brave, unostentatious, clean-living gentlemen, like Bayard, premier knight of France, _sans peur et sans reproche_. CHAPTER VII G.H.Q. In an army in which abbreviation by capital letter is carried to the pitch of mania, the hieroglyphics standing at the head of this chapter may be recognized, without undue difficulty, as signifying _General Headquarters_. This is a comparatively simple combination. It is not always thus. One requires a certain amount of practice to discern the different offices of the army in the field in a row of letters flashed out at one in conversation with soldier-men. “Can you direct me to the D.A.D.O.S.?” a dusty motor-cyclist despatch-rider, one foot trailing on the ground beside his snorting machine, asks a quartermaster-sergeant in a village. “First on the right past the D.A.D.R.T.’s, the red house next to the A.P.M.” Quite unperturbed by this fearsome array of letters, the youth whirrs cheerily off, and finds his destination without difficulty. Question and answer, as interpreted to the layman, signify: “Can you direct me to the Deputy Assistant Director of Ordnance Services?” “First on the right past the Deputy Assistant Director of Railway Transport, the red house next to the Assistant Provost Marshal.”