spy system is something marvelous. Why, they knew the exact date our reinforcements were coming on one occasion nearly a week beforehand, when the majority of our fellows hadn't even an idea there were any expected!

In some cases they got information from French villagers whom they had bought before they retreated. I saw one such case myself. We were bivouacked in a ruined village, and a lot of us were sleeping in and around a cottage that hadn't been damaged. We were downstairs, while the owner of the cottage and his wife and kid had the upstairs room. One of our boys happened to go outside in the night and, by jingo! he saw the fellow coolly signaling with a lamp behind his curtain. He went along and told the Captain, who was at the schoolhouse, and they came back with a couple of under officers and arrested them red-handed. He tried to hide under the bed, and howled for mercy when they pulled him out. His wife never turned a hair—the Sergeant told me she looked as if she was glad he'd been caught. They shot him there and then in his own yard, and his wife was around in the morning just as if nothing had happened.

"Pluckiest Thing in the War."

After that we always used to be very suspicious of any house or village that wasn't devastated when everything round had been chewed up; there was nearly always a spy concealed somewhere not far off. To give you a case in point: There was a fine big château near Craonelle, where our trenches were, that hadn't been bombarded, though they had stripped most of the furniture and stuff out of it. Well, one fine day the General commanding our section thought it would be a convenient place to hold a big pow-wow. He and his staff had only been seated at the table about ten minutes when a whacking great 310-millimeter shell burst right on top of the darned place, followed by a perfect hail of others. The General and his staff ran for their lives; luckily none of them were badly hurt, though they got the deuce of a scare.

After the bombardment some of us went along to look at what was left of the château, and—will you believe me?—we found a little old Dutch sous-off half choked in the cellar, but still hanging on to the business end of a telephone. I call that the pluckiest thing I've seen at the war, and I can tell you we were mighty sorry to have to shoot him. He never turned a hair, either, and we didn't even suggest bandaging his eyes. He knew what was coming to him from the start; that he was as good as a dead man from the moment he got into the cellar. He told us he had been there a week, just waiting for some confiding bunch of French officers to come along and hold a meeting.

It's funny how some men meet death, anyway. We had one nigger prize fighter along with us named Bob Scanlon. He was the blackest coon you ever saw, until one day there came a great big "marmite" that burst almost on top of him and buried him in the mud. We dug him out, and he wasn't even scratched, but ever afterward he has been a kind of mulatto color, he was so darned scared by the narrowness of his escape.

Good Way to Die.

Another boy, an Englishman, got out of the trench one day to stretch his legs, as he said he was tired of sitting still. Some one called to him to come down and not be a fool, as the Germans were keeping up a constant rifle fire, and after a minute or two he jumped back into the trench. "They didn't get you, did they?" called out some one. "Oh, no!" he answered, sitting down. Then all of a sudden he just keeled over slowly sideways without a sound, and, believe me, when they went to pick him up he was as dead as David—plugged clean through the heart. He never even felt the shock of it. If they do ever get me, that's the way I hope to die.

Bert Hall.

FRENCHMAN MEETS THAT STRANGE BEING, TOMMY ATKINS.

LATTER'S UN-FRENCH WAYS AMUSINGLY DEPICTED BY PARISIAN JOURNALIST FOR HIS READERS.

The thousands of English soldiers now on French soil are, to Frenchmen, strange, exotic creatures, the study of which is full of delightful surprises. Recently a French journalist traveled to the trenches, interviewed several specimens of the genus Tommy Atkins, and published the results in a Paris newspaper.

One Tommy was "of the species crane," with thin legs and arms like telegraph wires, by no means as taciturn as the Frenchman had believed Englishmen to be. He told the Frenchman some tall yarns.

"In one fight our battalion lost five hundred men," he vouchsafed. "One bullet, which just scratched my nose, killed my pal beside me."

Another Tommy dwelt on the awful fact that he had been "twenty-two days on water without any tea in it." He, too, had been in the thick of the fray and had killed several of the enemy with his own hand, which, recounts the Frenchman, filled him with "a gentle joy."

"Are the inhabitants of this part of France hospitable?" the journalist inquired of another Englishman.

"Awfully nice!" replied the soldier. These words the correspondent, after giving them in English, to show how strange they look, translates: "Terriblement aimable"—a combination which must appear perfectly incomprehensible to Frenchmen, who do not see how a thing can be "awful" and "nice" at the same time.

At a village in Northern France the newspaper man found some English soldiers instructing a lot of village boys in the rudiments of football.

"When the French team scored a point," he writes, "I said to one of the Englishmen: 'But aren't you ashamed to let them beat you at your own game?' To which the Briton replied: 'Ah, but we want to encourage the people of France to take up sports!'"

Football was being played wherever there were Englishmen. Often the games were between teams of English and French soldiers. Where a ball was not to be had, the players were quite content to kick about a bundle of clothes.

When not thus engaged, the English soldier finds time to enter the lists of Cupid. The French writer tells of one Tommy whom he saw "promenading proudly before the awe-struck glances of the villagers with three girls on his arm!"

"The English? Oh, they're good fellows!" remarked a villager in whose house a number of the allies of France were quartered. "They're in bed snoring every night at eight. They get together in my kitchen while I make their tea and sing sentimental songs. They're all musical." The journalist adds, in corroboration of this statement, that he himself heard Tommies "singing discordantly to the accompaniment of the cannon."

Also he found that Tommy had a sense of humor. On one occasion, he learned, a German officer came charging at the head of his men into an English trench. Leaping over the edge of it, he fell headlong into a sea of black mud, from which he picked himself up, black and dripping, and exclaimed:

"What a confounded nuisance this old war is, isn't it?"

Whereupon a Tommy, about to run his bayonet through the intruder, burst into roars of laughter, and made him a prisoner instead.

"And the Tommies are philosophers, too," writes the Frenchman. "I heard one of them say solemnly to a comrade: 'If you have any money, spend it all to-day. You may be dead to-morrow!'"

ONE YOUNG SOLDIER WHO PROVED A HERO.

"Jean Berger, 'simple soldat' of the Second Regiment of Infantry, should, after the war, be Jean Berger, V. C. He is a Frenchman—yes; but listen to this story:

"He, a boy of about eighteen years of age, lies in