, swung
violently round the corner and joined us. Three more shells fell. Then
silence. "These sudden bursts of fire are very disconcerting, aren't
they?" remarked the colonel as he mounted and rode away.

"Say, now!" said the doctor to me. "I think we'll call back and have
that whisky-and-soda Major Bullivant offered us before we resume our
journey."

"We'll take a trip up to the 'O.P.' this morning," said the colonel to
me at breakfast on October 28th. The wind was sufficiently drying to
make walking pleasant, and to tingle the cheeks. The sun was a tonic;
the turned-up earth smelt good. Our Headquarter horses had been put out
to graze in the orchard--a Boche 4.2 had landed in it the night
before--and they were frolicking mightily, Wilde's charger "Blackie"
being especially industrious shooing off one of the mules from the
colonel's mare. There was a swirling and a skelter of brown and yellow
leaves at the gap in the lane where we struck across a vegetable
garden. A square patch torn from a bed-sheet flew taut from the top of
a clump of long hop-poles--the sign, before the village was freed, to
warn our artillery observers that civilians lived in the cottage close
by. Similar, now out-of-date, white flags swung to the breeze from many
roof-tops in the village. "The extraordinary feature," the colonel
mentioned, "was the number of Tricolours that the French had been able
to hide from the Germans; they put them out when we came through." He
nodded a pleasant good-day to a good looking young staff officer who
stood on the steps of the house in the _pave_-laid street where one of
our infantry brigades had made their headquarters. The staff officer
wore a pair of those full-below-the-knee "plus 4 at golf" breeches that
the Gardee affects. "For myself, I wouldn't wear that kind of breeches
unless I were actually on duty with the Guards," said the colonel
rather sardonically--"they are so intensely ugly." A tiny piano tinkled
at a corner house near the roofless church and the Grande Place. In
two-foot letters on the walls in the square were painted, "Hommes" on
some houses, "Femmes" on others: reminders of the Boche method of
segregating the sexes before he evacuated the inhabitants he wanted to
evacuate. Only five civilians remained in the village now--three old
men and two feeble decrepit women, numbed and heart-sick with the war,
but obstinate in clinging to their homesteads. Already some of our men
were patching leaky,