n when the sky turns dull yellow-white like an
old smoker's beard, and before dusk the snowflakes begin to fall. Far
back the cursing drivers are dragging their jibbing horses past
half-frozen shell-holes, which they can scarcely see. And out there,
where the freezing sentries keep watch over the fringe where
civilisation grinds against the German--out there under the tender white
mantle, flickering pink and orange under the gun flashes--out there for
a few short hours the land which Kultur has defaced comes by its own.

CHAPTER XXX

THE GRASS BANK

_France, December 10th._

The connection of Tamar the Hammerhead, who cut the Grass Bank out of
the forest, with Timothy Gibbs, of Booligal, in New South Wales, may not
be clear at first sight. Tam's beech forest covered two or three green
hills in Gaul at the time when Caius Sulpicius, and his working party of
the Tenth Legion, were laying down new paving stones on the big road
from Amiens over the hill-tops. The wagon carrying the military
secretary to the Governor had bumped uncomfortably down that long slope
the week before; and as the Tenth Legion was resting, its commanding
officer received, two days later, an order to detail another fatigue
party. The big trees looked down on a string of private soldiers
shouldering big square paving stones from a neighbouring dump, where the
wagons stood, and fitting them carefully into the pavement, and--and
otherwise enjoying their rest. Caius Sulpicius and his orderly officer
stood watching them. The orderly officer leant on his stick. Caius had a
piece of bread in one hand and a wedge of cheese in the other. His
forearm was black with grubbing amongst the paving stones.

"When the Tenth Legion gets a rest without some old brass helmet helping
us to spend it," he said with his mouth full, "I'll begin to think the
end of the war is coming."

"Why didn't it strike old Brassribs to make the inhabitants do a job of
work occasionally?" he added presently. "Now, in the old general's
time--"

Far down on the edge of the forest, across two or three miles of rolling
hills, a patch of orange earth, newly turned, caught the orderly
officer's eye. One of the inhabitants was doing a job of work there,
anyway. Two days ago he had passed that way in a stroll after parade. A
mallet-headed man, his bare arm-muscles orange with mud, was piling up
an earthen embankment on the hill-side. A patch of the forest had been
allowed to him.