return
to take away his clothes. The great cathedral was crumbling to dust,
and saints, apostles, prophets, martyrs were being hurled from their
niches of stone, the Virgin alone standing unscathed upon her pedestal
contemplating the ruin and tribulation around her. And we knew that
while we gazed the roads from the doomed city to Locre and Poperinghe
were choked with a terror-stricken stream of fugitives, ancient men
hobbling upon sticks, aged women clutching copper pans, and stumbling
under the weight of feather-beds, while whimpering children fumbled
among their mothers' skirts. What convulsive eddies each of the shells,
whose trajectory we heard ever and anon in the skies overhead, were
making in that living stream were to us a subject of poignant
speculation.

But as I looked immediately around me I found it ever more difficult to
believe that such things were being done upon the earth. The carpenter
went on hammering, stopping but for a moment to shade his eyes with his
hand and gaze out over the plain, the peasants in the field continued to
hoe, a woman came out of a cottage with a child clinging to her skirts,
and said, "La guerre, quand finira-t-elle, M'sieu'?" From far above us
the song of the lark, now lost to sight in the aerial blue, floated down
upon the drowsy air.

XXV

THE DAY'S WORK

It was dinner hour in the Mess. There were some dozen of us all
told--the Camp Commandant, the Deputy-Assistant-Adjutant-General, the
Assistant-Provost-Marshal, the Assistant-Director of Medical Services,
the Sanitary Colonel (which adjective has nothing to do with his
personal habits), the Judge-Advocate, two men of the Intelligence, a
_padre_, and myself. Most of us were known by our initials--our official
initials--for the use of them saves time and avoids pomposity. Our
duties were both extensive and peculiar, as will presently appear, for
we were in the habit of talking shop. There was, indeed, little else to
talk about. When you are billeted in a small town in Flanders with no
amusements and few amenities--neither theatres, nor sport, nor
books--and with little prospect of getting a move on, you can but
chronicle the small beer of your quotidian adventures. And these be
engaging enough at times.

As we sat down to the stew which our orderly had compounded with the
assistance of the ingenious Mr. Maconochie, the Camp Commandant sighed
heavily. "I am a kind of receptacle for the waste products of
every