Happy hours are those spent just behind the line between the strenuous days of strife, when one feels merely a spectator of the pageantry of war, when one can study men at their best, for the strain of war brings out the good qualities of human nature and atrophies the bad. Hours they are of leisure, when one may drive into a town of perhaps some considerable local importance, where, even under the strange forms that war has cast upon it, the old peace-time life of the community yet lives. Not all the jostling crowd of khaki, the long trains of supply columns that block the narrow mediæval streets of Béthune, have essentially altered the character of the place as the market-town of the neighbouring district; the old square tower, the graceful belfry, still look down upon a crowd of _gamins_, of hatless women and girls, of old men standing in the market-place. Only the young men are wanting, and their place is taken by this surging crowd of the young men of another nation. Commercially, all such towns must be reaping a golden harvest. See how every pastry-cook's window bears the legend "Tea Rooms," extending below it a tempting array of _pâtisserie_ that would shame the best of those dreadful "tea-shops" of our native land. And, when sufficiently allured, elbow your way in amongst the hungry rabble that speak a curious tongue they believe to be French--it does not matter, the proprietress and her daughter learnt English long ago, and have now almost acquired this same curious tongue--and try to get a seat. So it is with all the shops, and the Frenchman, with his instinct to provide what is required, has contrived that the most exacting of these English officers with their innumerable and most peculiar wants, shall rarely go away unsatisfied. In such towns as these will be found the representatives of those peculiar units that are raised (or do they raise themselves?) apparently for the sole purpose of encumbering the roads. But perhaps in the villages is seen the more amusing side of international commerce. In the towns everybody seems to know by instinct what the soldier wants--I have heard a gunner ask for fried fish and chips in the vernacular of Newcastle, and get it--but in the villages considerable parleying is sometimes necessary. There is a story of a man who rode to a farmhouse where eggs were to be obtained, and demanded "oofs." But madame was unresponsive. "Non compris, monsieur, peut-être il veut du lait, de la beurre----?" Desperate, the man dismounted, and, picking up his horse's foot, tapped it significantly. "No, ma'am, not lay or burr, oofs, oofs, can't you see?" XII A WAR MESS