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Updated: June 4, 2025
Tony sprang out on to the platform and hurried forward to greet her. He was looking thinner than when she had last seen him. His face was a little haggard, and the eyes beneath their long lashes were hard and bright. "This is awfully good of you, Ann," he said, speaking a trifle awkwardly. "Does Robin mind my suddenly billeting myself on you like this?" "Mind? Why, of course not!
She went downstairs, conscious of gripping herself in order to discuss with the officers whatever business of billeting was in hand. For she had dealt with all such matters since her arrival in Frélus. She reached the front door and saw a dusty car with a military chauffeur at the wheel and two officers, standing on the pavement at the foot of the steps.
A billeting officer has told me that fifty per cent. of the householders whom he has approached show manifest hostility to the housing of soldiers. But the military authorities have a way of dealing with these people. On one occasion an officer asked a citizen, an elderly man full of paunch and English dignity, how many soldiers could he keep in his house. "Well, it's like this ," the man began.
Do you see that square?" and he swung the barrel of the telescope so that it commanded a cobble-paved place, with a small fountain in the centre, flanked on three sides by rows of red-brick dwellings. "I see it plainly," I told him. "The Boches are evidently billeting their men in those houses," he continued.
For the mixed American and French regiment known as the "Here-We-Comes" was billeted at Meran-en-Laye during a respite from the rigors and perils of the front-line trenches. The rest and the freedom from risks, supposed to be a part of the "billeting" system, were not wholly the portion of the "Here-We Comes." Meran en Laye was just then a somewhat important little speck on the warmap.
Billeting has gained for the soldier many friends, and towns that have become accustomed to his presence look sadly forward to the day when he will leave them for the front, where no kind landlady will be at hand to transform raw beef and potatoes into beef pudding or potato pie. The working classes in particular view the future with misgiving.
The weather couldn't be bettered; sharp and cold in the early morning with a heavy hoarfrost spreading its white mantle over everything, then out would come the sun, and the hills would be shrouded in mist. My billeting officer had arranged matters well, so we were comfortably installed and in good shape to "police up" for the final leg of the march to Coblenz.
We were, of course, entirely inexperienced at this time, and in the light of subsequent events, this, our first attempt at billeting, was a most ludicrous performance.
He thus gave her accounts at fifteen paces of his experiences in camp, in quarters, in Flanders, and elsewhere; of the difference between line and column, of forced marches, billeting, and such-like, together with his hopes of promotion. Anne listened at first indifferently; but knowing no one else so good-natured and experienced, she grew interested in him as in a brother.
"That this hath been done, appeareth by the billeting of soldiers, a thing nowise advantageous to the king's service, and a burden to the commonwealth: by the imprisonment of gentlemen for refusing the loan, who, if they had done the contrary for fear, had been as blamable as the projector of that oppressive measure.
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