jogging along
the road, "that if I turned on to the grass at this moment and put
spurs into her, she wouldn't stop till she got to Amiens.... No one in
the Tank Corps has been able to pull her up under four miles, and only
then when she came to a seven-foot hedge.... But I was beginning to
understand her."

When I accompanied the colonel on his visits to the Infantry brigades
all the talk was of the training of the youngsters, who now formed so
considerable a portion of the battalion strengths. "They are good
stuff," I heard one of the brigadiers say, "and I keep drumming into
them that they are fighting for England, and that the Boche mustn't gain
another yard of ground." He was a fighter, this brigadier--although I
have never yet met another officer who took it as a matter of course
that his camp-bed should be equipped with linen sheets when he was
living in the firing line.

About three-quarters of a mile from our headquarters was a tiny
cemetery, set in a grove of trees on a bare hillside, sequestered,
beautiful in its peacefulness and quiet. One morning, very early, I
walked out to view it more closely. It had escaped severe shelling,
although chipped tombstones and broken railings and scattered pieces of
painted wire wreaths showed that the hell-blast of destruction had not
altogether passed it by. I went softly into the little chapel. On the
floor, muddy, noisy-sleeping soldiers lay sprawled in ungainly
attitudes. Rifles were piled against the wall; mess-tins and
water-bottles lay even upon the altar. And somehow there seemed nothing
incongruous about the spectacle, nothing that would hurt a profoundly
religious mind. It was all part of the war.

And one night when I was restless, and even the heavy drugging warmth
of the dug-out did not dull me to sleep, I climbed up into the open
air. It was a lovely night. The long dark wood stood out black and
distinct in the clear moonlight; the stars twinkled in their calm
abode. Suddenly a near-by battery of long-range guns cracked out an
ear-splitting salvo. And before the desolating rush of the shells had
faded from the ear a nightingale hidden among the trees burst into
song. That also was part of the war.

IV. HAPPY DAYS!

During the month of June Brigade Headquarters retired from the trench
dug-out and settled in the end house of the village, a white-walled,
vine-clad building, with a courtyard and stables and a neat garden that
only one Boche shell had