to
know it was me what hit that Hun. I'll just go on a little, I'll . . .
Good-bye, boy; I'm sorry--dam sorry."

With his strange, loping walk the poacher and jailbird walked off in
the wake of the Tank, which was now ploughing merrily forward again.
Fifty yards away he stopped, and cut another nick. "Ninety-three," he
muttered; "not bad. But it wouldn't never have done for the boy to
have known." Undoubtedly theology was not his strong point.

Slowly, an inch or two at a time, Reginald Simpkins slithered down the
sloping side of the shell hole till he reached the bottom. To the
batches of prisoners coming back--just a casualty; to the
reinforcements coming up--just a casualty. To the boy himself--the
great price.

And so, in the shell-ploughed, gun-furrowed No Man's Land is the seed
of Britain sown. And the harvest----?

PART IV

HARVEST

"Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn
them: but gather the wheat into my barn."

MATTHEW xiii. 30.

HARVEST

"For shoulders curved with the counter stoop will be carried
erect and square;
And faces white from the office light will be bronzed by the
open air;
And we'll walk with the stride of a new-born pride, with a
new-found joy in our eyes;
Scornful men who have diced with death under the naked skies.

"For some of us smirk in a chiffon shop, and some of us teach
in a school;
Some of us help with the seat of our pants to polish an
office stool;
The merits of somebody's soap or jam some of us seek to explain;
But all of us wonder what we'll do when we have to go back
again."--R. W. SERVICE.

What of the harvest? It is coming, perhaps sooner than we expect,
perhaps not for many weary months. But the reaper is even now
sharpening his sickle in readiness, and--what of the crops?

Into No Man's Land have gone alike, the wheat of honest endeavour and
hardship well borne, and the tares of class hatred and selfishness.
Had ever reaper nobler task in front of him than the burning of those
tares and the gathering of that wheat into the nation's barn? . . .

In the Chateau at Boesinghe, where the moss is growing round the broken
doors and the rank weeds fill the garden, with the stagnant Yser hard
by; in Ypres, where the rooks nest in the crumbling Cloth Hall and a
man's footsteps ring loud and hollow on the silent square; in
Vermelles, where the c