so that's all
right," he said to himself. "I haven't got to muddle things up any
more."

The sea lay around them at dawn like a sheet of pearl--it was very empty
but for the gulls' wings beating to and fro out of the mist.

Winn had lived through many campaigns. He had known rough jungle tussles
in mud swamps, maddened by insects, thirst, and fever; he had fought in
colder, cleaner dangers down the Khyber Pass, and he had gone through
the episodic scientific flurries of South Africa; but France
disconcerted him; he had never started a campaign before in a country
like a garden, met by welcoming populations, with flowers and fruit.

It made him feel sick. The other places were the proper ones for war.

It was not his way to think of what lay before him. It would, like all
great emergencies, like all great calamities, keep to its moment, and
settle itself. Nevertheless he could not free his mind from the presence
of the villages--the pleasant, smiling villages, the little church
towers in the middle, the cobbled streets, the steep-pitched, gray roofs
and the white sunny walls.

Carnations and geraniums filled the windows, and all the inhabitants,
the solid, bright-faced people, had a greeting for their khaki guests.

"Voila quelque choses des solides, ces Anglais!" the women called to
each other.

Winn found himself shrinking from their welcoming eyes. He thought he
hadn't had enough sleep, because as a rule a Staines did not shrink; but
when he slept in the corner of the hot jolting railway train, he dreamed
of the villages.

They were to attack directly they arrived at their destination. By the
time they reached there, Winn knew more. He had gathered up the hastily
flung messages by telegram and telephone, by flying cars and from
breathless despatch riders, and he knew what they meant.

They had no chance, from the first, not a ghost of a chance. They were
to hold on as long as they could, and then retreat. Part of the line had
gone already. The French had gone. No reinforcements were coming up.
There were no reinforcements.

They were to retreat turn and turn about; meantime they must hold.

They could hear the guns now, the bright harvest fields trembled a
little under the impact of these alien presences.

They came nearer and the sky filled with white puffs of smoke that
looked like glittering sunset clouds, and were not clouds. Overhead the
birds sang incessantly, undisturbed even by the occasional dri