LVII
SCOTTISH SOLDIERS IN A FRENCH BARN
A typical billet for troops on the march or enjoying a “Divisional rest” between two turns of duty in the trenches. An average-sized barn at a French farm will house about thirty men. If the straw be deep and the roof sound it makes better quarters than anything but a good bedroom. Its chief drawback in the men’s eyes is that smoking has to be forbidden because of the straw. In the winter evenings the men usually cross the farmyard to the kitchen, where they smoke and make friends with the farmer, and buy coffee, at a penny a bowl, from his wife.
LVIII
WELSH SOLDIERS
Characteristic trench attitudes, two of the men with their heads well down, the cheek cuddling the small of the butt, while the N.C.O. beyond directs their fire, with his head a little free. There is just the same soldierly combination of “much care and valour” in the typical Welshman in France to-day as there was in Shakespeare’s Fluellen.