anings of the farm's absent owner. A row of decently
ventilated stables faced the farmhouse, while at the end of the
courtyard, opposite to the entrance gates, stood an enormous
high-doored barn. The entrance-hall of the house gave, on the left, to
two connecting stone-flagged rooms, one of which Manning used as a
kitchen--Meddings, our regular cook, was on leave. The other room, with
its couple of spacious civilian beds, we used as a mess, and the
colonel and the adjutant slept there. The only wall decorations were
two "samplers" executed by a small daughter of the house, a school
certificate in a plain frame, and a couple of gaudy-tinselled religious
pictures. A pair of pot dogs on the mantelpiece were as stupidly ugly
as some of our own mid-Victorian cottage treasures. And there were the
usual glass-covered orange blossoms mounted on red plush and gilt
leaves--the wedding custom traditional to the country districts of
Northern France. The inner door of this room opened directly into the
stable where our horses were stalled. An infantry colonel and his staff
occupied the one large and the two small rooms to the right of the
entrance-hall; but after dinner they left us to go forward, and my
servant put down a mattress on the stone floor of one of the smaller
rooms for me to sleep upon. Wilde took possession of the other little
chamber. The large room, which contained a colossal oak wardrobe,
became our mess after breakfast next day. The signallers had fixed
their telephone exchange in the vaulted cellar beneath the house, and
the servants and grooms crowded there as well when the Boche's
night-shelling grew threatening.

After a long deprivation we had come into a country where cabbages and
carrots, turnips and beetroot, were to be had for the picking; and
there were so many plates and glasses to be borrowed from the
farmhouse cupboards that I feared greatly that Manning would feel
bound to rise to the unexampled occasion by exercising his well-known
gift for smashing crockery. We dined pleasantly and well that night;
and when the night-firing programme had been sent out to the
batteries--the Boche was in force in the big thick forest that lay
three thousand yards east of our farm--we settled down to a good hour's
talk. Wilde told me of the German sniper they had found shot just
before the advance to this village; the adjutant narrated the
magnificent gallantry of an officer who had relinquished his job of
Reconnaissa