He presently returned with the front and rear seats of the automobile piled high with bundled sheaves of the brown weed--you can get an astonishingly vast number of those domestic French cigars for the equivalent of thirty dollars in American money--and we turned the whole cargo over to the head nurse on condition that, until the supply was exhausted, she give a cigar to every hurt soldier who might crave one, regardless of his nationality.

She cried as she thanked us for the small charity.
"We can feed them--yes," she said, "but we have nothing to give them to smoke, and it is very hard on them." A little later a train arrived which brought three carloads of French prisoners and one carload of English.

Among the Frenchmen were many Alpine Rangers, so called--the first men we had seen of this wing of the service--and by reason of their dark blue uniforms and their flat blue caps they looked more like sailors than soldiers.

At first we took them for sailors.

There were thirty-four of the Englishmen, being all that were left of a company of the West Yorkshire Regiment of infantry.
Confinement for days in a bare box car, with not even water to wash their faces and hands in, had not altogether robbed them of a certain trim alertness which seems to belong to the British fighting man.