looks to what might have been, but now can never be.

A spark glittered near, a spark that towered and hovered overhead, and
burst into coiling volumes of lurid smoke with a moving heart of flame.
Light broke on a neighbouring hill that had been unseen and forgotten;
the hill was crowned with fantastic trees that danced, and a wavering
tower. From our own valley below there came a vicious tearing that gave
me a momentary chill (so sounds a stream of machine-gun lead, going
over), and a group of coloured stars expanded over us. Their bright light
showed the night reticulated with thin lines of smoke, like veins of
calcite in a canopy of black marble. Our immediate country, pallid and
tremulous, faded again, but in that brief prospect of a shadow land I
glimpsed a road, the presentment of the long road to Bapaume. So the
Bapaume road showed at night by inconsequential and unexpected lights.
That hill-crest of leaping trees could be the ridge of Loupart with its
wood, and Achete in flames beyond. The notion gave me enough of our hill
top. I descended from it.

There is a public-house at the foot of the hill, and a lane of harsh
noises and a beam of light projected together from its open door across
the road. Beyond it I turned into a house, for I knew I should find there
an aged and solitary man who would have his own thoughts on such a night
as this; for he had a son, and the spectre of the Bapaume road had
reminded me where that boy was celebrating whatever peace he knew. His
father was not communicative; and what could I say? He sat, answering me
distantly and austerely, and he might have been a bearded sage seeing in
retrospect a world he had long known, and who at last had made up his
mind about it, though he would not tell me what that was. Outside we
could hear revellers approaching. They paused at our door; their feet
began to shuffle, and they sang:

"If I catch you bending,
I'll turn you upside down,
Knees up, knees up,
Knees up, knees up,
Knees up, Father Brown."

XXVII. The Real Thing

JANUARY 9, 1920. There was a country town of which we heard wonderful
tales as children. But it was as far as Cathay. It had many of the
qualities that once made Cathay desirable and almost unbelievable. We
heard of it at the time when we heard of the cities of Vanity Fair and
Baghdad, and all from a man with a beard, who once sat by a London fire,
just before bedtime, smoking a pipe and telling