something in line
with Stanley's 'Dr. Livingstone, I presume.' It was comforting to find
it otherwise, but, as Smee says in _Peter Pan_, it was 'galling too.'
First when looking into a shop window, and now in a concert hall, in all
these months of war! We said, 'Not a bad show, is it?' 'Not half bad.'
But there have been some strange meetings in this war. A private in our
battalion discovered his son, a boy of seventeen, in a new draft which
had just come up to the line. He had run away from home and been lost to
sight. The father set matters on a proper footing by thrashing his son
there and then in the front trench!

War was not very far off after all. Two days later we were having lunch
in the comfortable warm restaurant which is this tedious town's other
attraction. We drank our coffee to the accompaniment of the nasty sound
of arriving shells. Every time a shell screamed towards us the stout
lady behind the counter dropped on hands and knees, emerging flushed and
trembling after each had burst. We were rather amused; but when we went
out and round the corner of the street, the body of a man was being
swiftly carried away wrapped in a brown blanket. Forty soldiers, it was
said, had been killed and wounded. Distracted women stood in little
groups in the passages of the houses, and there was much blood in the
gutters.

Only a country invaded by the enemy drinks to its dregs the cup of war,
but the narrow belt a few miles behind the friendly army's trenches
enjoys great prosperity. The love of home or the love of money keeps the
population in many places where it would be better away. One beautiful
spring day I took shelter behind a farmhouse in the Hallebast-Vierstraat
area until some shelling on the path ahead had died down. The farmer's
wife came out and we got into conversation. A rise in the ground gave
some shelter from the German lines, but she told me that any movement on
horseback was immediately sniped with whizbangs. The day before all her
cows had been killed by shell-fire in the paddock behind the farmhouse,
but if she and her elderly husband let their land go out of cultivation,
how were they to live, and if they left, where could they go? When
high-explosives blew great holes in their sown land they just filled in
the holes and ploughed and sowed the place over again. The settled
sadness of her face and voice haunts me still. Others, however, stay in
danger because they are making so much money. Several