t the Hotel de l'Epee Royale, wherever that may be.
Let's go and track it down."

So we wandered down the Rue de Lille, as yet relatively free from the
ravages of war, for the shops were open and the inhabitants stood
talking and gossiping at the doors of their houses. Here and there
rubble lay across the pavement, and what had once been a home was now an
amorphous pile of bricks and beams. Just by the church was a ruined
restaurant, and a host of little children played hide and seek behind
the remnants of its walls.

On our way down the street we came across Reynolds, who had only joined
the regiment the night before, while we, who had been nearly three weeks
at the front, felt ourselves war-beaten veterans compared to him. He was
standing on the pavement, gazing excitedly up at an aeroplane, around
which were bursting little white puffs of smoke.

"Come along with us," said Lytton. "You'll get sick to death of seeing
aeroplanes shelled when you've been out here as long as we have. Come
and discover the scene of to-night's orgy."

In the Grande Place, at the side of the Cloth Hall, we discovered the
Hotel de l'Epee Royale. A "Jack Johnson" had made an enormous hole in
the pavement just in front of it, and a large corner of the building had
gone.

"By Jove," said Reynolds in an awed voice. "What a hole! It must have
taken some shell to do that."

Lytton smiled patronisingly. "My dear fellow," he said, "that's nothing
at all. It's hardly any bigger than the hole that a spent bullet makes.
Let's go inside and get some lunch to see what sort of a place it is."

But Reynolds and I were firm. "Rot!" we said. "Let's go home and fast.
Otherwise we shall be no good for this evening; we've got our duty to do
to the dinner."

So we went back to the Company Mess in the infantry barracks, past a
house that had been destroyed that morning. Hunting in and out of the
ruins were a man and a woman, and another woman, very old, with eyes
swollen by weeping, sat on what was left of the wall of her house, a
broken photograph frame in her hands.

There are many fellows who have laid down their lives since that little
dinner in the Hotel de l'Epee Royale; he who gave it died of wounds six
weeks later, as gallant a commanding officer as one could wish to have.
If the dinner were to take place again, there would be many gaps round
the table, and even the building must long since have been pounded to
dust.

If this should meet the