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: