a shell in a village street
which killed his horse after the charge. He had hobbled away,
reached a railroad train, and got on board. That was all he knew.

A Scotch private had been lying with his battalion in a trench when a
German aeroplane was sighted. It had hardly passed by when
showers of shrapnel descended, and the Germans, in that grey-
green so hard to see, were coming on as thick as locusts. Then the
orders came to fall back, and he was hit as his battalion made
another stand. He had crawled a mile across the fields in the night
with a bullet in his arm. A medical corps officer told him to find any
transportation he could; and he, too, was able to get aboard a train.
That was all he knew.

These wounded had been tossed aside into eddies by the maelstrom
of action. They were interesting because they were the first British
wounded that I had seen; because the war was young.

Back to London again to catch the steamer with an article. One was
to take a season ticket to the war from London as home. It was a
base whence one sallied forth to get peeps through the curtain of
military secrecy at the mighty spectacle. You soaked in England at
intervals and the war at intervals. Whenever you stepped on the pier
at Folkestone it was with a breath of relief, born of a sense of freedom
long associated with fields and hedges on the other side of the chalk
cliffs which seemed to make the sequestering barrier of the sea
complete.

Those days of late August and early September, 10.14, were gripping
days to the memory. Eager armies were pressing forward to a
cataclysm no longer of dread imagination but of reality. That ever-
deepening and spreading stain from Switzerland to the North Sea
was as yet only a splash of fresh blood. You still wondered if you
might not wake up in the morning and find the war a nightmare.
Pictures that grow clearer with time, which the personal memory
chooses for its own, dissociate themselves from a background of
detail.

They were very quiet, this pair that sat at the next table in the dining-
room of a London hotel. I never spoke to them, but only stole discreet
glances, as we all will in irresistible temptation at any newly-wedded
couple. Neither was of the worldly type. One knew that to this young
girl London was strange; one knew the type of country home which
had given her that simple charm which cities cannot breed; one
knew, too, that this young officer, her husband, waited for word t