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(7).
Armentieres is quite a big City and was before the war a big silk centre. It is almost the size of Marseilles but of course it is dead now, all the big warehouses, banks, etc. are closed up and the railways and tramways no longer run. The tramway system was a regular net work showing that it must have been a busy spot in its days. Most of the smaller shops are still open and there are two very fine afternoon tea shops where officers out from the trenches sip tea and eat strawberries and cream and forget about the war - to properly forget it you want to stuff wadding in your ears to keep out the never ceasing row of the gun fire. The strawberries by the way, just at the present, are as big as ping pong balls - some even bigger. We are not a bit interested in war news here, we get quite enough war of our own. Even the every day joke about the number of prisoners the Russians have captured fails to raise a smile these days. There is one English weekly, The Tatler, which makes a point of not mentioning a word about the war. It is very popular here containig as it does mostly photos of actresses and the like - something away from the war. Most of the stuff you read in the papers about the war is all piffle. A few lines tells all the news, and the rest is bunkum - interviews with "Anzac Heroes" who never left Egypt, and the like. Everybody here is disgusted with all this prominence given to Australians on the Western Front - prominence at the expense of the Imperial and other Dominion troops who are really bearing the brunt of the fighting. Its Anzac this and Anzac that. Any little thing they do is magnified to an enormous extent and when they are doing nothing the journalists are equal to it, and manufacture the most ludicrous stories of events which never happened.