it that continuance of the present trench warfare may
lead to those engaged in it, especially bombing parties and barbed
wire cutters, being more heavily armoured than the knights, who
fought at Bouvines and at Agincourt.--_The Times_, July 22, 1915

The war is already a fruitful mother of legends. Some people think
that there are too many war legends, and a Croydon gentleman--or lady,
I am not sure which--wrote to me quite recently telling me that a
certain particular legend, which I will not specify, had become the
"chief horror of the war." There may be something to be said for this
point of view, but it strikes me as interesting that the old
myth-making faculty has survived into these days, a relic of noble,
far-off Homeric battles. And after all, what do we know? It does not
do to be too sure that this, that, or the other hasn't happened and
couldn't have happened.

What follows, at any rate, has no claim to be considered either as
legend or as myth. It is merely one of the odd circumstances of these
times, and I have no doubt it can easily be "explained away." In fact,
the rationalistic explanation of the whole thing is patent and on the
surface. There is only one little difficulty, and that, I fancy, is by
no means insuperable. In any case this one knot or tangle may be put
down as a queer coincidence and nothing more.

Here, then, is the curiosity or oddity in question. A young fellow,
whom we will call for avoidance of all identification Delamere Smith--
he is now Lieutenant Delamere Smith--was spending his holidays on the
coast of west South Wales at the beginning of the war. He was
something or other not very important in the City, and in his leisure
hours he smattered lightly and agreeably a little literature, a little
art, a little antiquarianism. He liked the Italian primitives, he knew
the difference between first, second, and third pointed, he had looked
through Boutell's "Engraved Brasses." He had been heard indeed to
speak with enthusiasm of the brasses of Sir Robert de Septvans and Sir
Roger de Trumpington.

One morning--he thinks it must have been the morning of August 16,
1914--the sun shone so brightly into his room that he woke early, and
the fancy took him that it would be fine to sit on the cliffs in the
pure sunlight. So he dressed and went out, and climbed up Giltar
Point, and sat there enjoying the sweet air and the radiance of the
sea, and the sight of the fringe of creaming foam a