If you have weathered around the world a bit, you know how everywhere strange situations turn into places for plain men to feel at home. Sailors on a Nova Scotia freight schooner, five days out, sit around in the evening glow and take a pipe and a chat with the same homely accustomedness, as if they were at a tavern. It is so in the jungle and at a lumber camp. Now, that is what the millions of average men have done to war. They have taken a raw, disordered, muddied, horrible thing, and given it a monotony and regularity of its own. They have smoked away its fighting tension, its hideous expectancy. They refuse to let mangling and murder put crimps in their spirit. Apparently there is nothing hellish enough to flatten the human spirit. Not all the sprinkled shells and caravans of bleeding victims can cow the boys of the front line. In this work of lifting clear of horror, tobacco has been a friend to the soldiers of the Great War.

"I wouldn't know a good cigarette if I saw it," said Geoffrey Gilling, after a year of ambulance work at Fumes and Coxyde. He had given up all that makes the life of an upper-class Englishman pleasant, and I think that the deprivation of high-grade smoking material was a severe item in his sacrifice.

Four of us in Red Cross work spent weary hours each day in a filthy room in a noisy wine-shop, waiting for fresh trouble to break loose. The dreariness of it made B - - petulant and T - - mournfully silent, and finally left me melancholy. But sturdy Andrew MacEwan, the Scotchman with the forty-inch barrel chest, would reach out for his big can of naval tobacco, slipped to him by the sailors at Dunkirk when the commissariat officer wasn't looking, and would light his short stocky pipe, shaped very much like himself, and then we were all off together on a jaunt around the world. He had driven nearly all known "makes" of motor-car over most of the map, apparently about one car to each country. Twelve months of bad roads in a shelled district had left him full of talk, as soon as he was well lit.

Up at Nieuport, last northern stand of the Allied line, a walking merchant would call each day, a basket around his throat, and in the hamper chocolate, fruit, and tobacco. A muddy, unshaven Brittany sailor, out of his few sous a week, bought us cigars. The less men have, the more generous they are. That is an old saying, but it drove home to me when I had poor men do me courtesy day by day for five months. As we motored in and out of Nieuport in the dark of the night, we passed hundreds of silent men trudging through the mud of the gutter. They were troops that had been relieved who were marching back for a rest. As soon as they came out of the zone where no sound can be made and no light shown, we saw here and there down the invisible ranks the sudden flare of a match, and then the glow in the cup of the hand, as the man prepared to cheer himself.

A more somber and lonely watch even than that of these French sailors was the vigil kept by our good Belgian friend, Commandant Gilson, in the shattered village of Pervyse. With his old Maltese cat, he prowled through the wrecked place till two and three of the morning, waiting for Germans to cross the flooded fields. For him cigarettes were an endless chain that went through his life. From the expiring stub he lit his fresh smoke, as if he were maintaining a vestal flame. He kept puffing till the live butt singed his upturned mustache. He squinted his eyes to escape the ascending smoke.