light of old stone steps, for generations the playground of
little children, and found a ruined church, and a battalion in
billets, recreating themselves with excellent music and a
little horseplay on the outer edge of the crowd. The trouble
in the hills was none of their business for that day.

Still higher up, on a narrow path among the trees, stood a
priest and three or four officers. They watched the battle
and claimed the great bursts of smoke for one side or the
other, at the same time as they kept an eye on the flickering
aeroplane. "Ours," they said, half under their breath.
"Theirs." "No, not ours that one--theirs! . . . That fool
is banking too steep . . . That's Boche shrapnel. They
always burst it high. That's our big gun behind that outer
hill . . . He'll drop his machine in the street if he
doesn't take care . . . There goes a trench-sweeper.
Those last two were theirs, but _that_"--it was a full roar
--"was ours."

BEHIND THE GERMAN LINES

The valley held and increased the sounds till they seemed to
hit our hillside like a sea.

A change of light showed a village, exquisitely pencilled atop
of a hill, with reddish haze at its feet.

"What is that place?" I asked.

The priest replied in a voice as deep as an organ: "That is
Saint------ It is in the Boche lines. Its condition is
pitiable."

The thunders and the smokes rolled up and diminished and
renewed themselves, but the small children romped up and down
the old stone steps; the beginner's aeroplane unsteadily
chased its own shadow over the fields; and the soldiers in
billet asked the band for their favourite tunes.

Said the lieutenant of local Guards as the cars went on:
"She--play--Tipperary."

And she did--to an accompaniment of heavy pieces in the hills,
which followed us into a town all ringed with enormous
searchlights, French and Boche together, scowling at each
other beneath the stars.

. . . .

It happened about that time that Lord Kitchener with General
Joffre reviewed a French Army Corps.

We came on it in a vast dip of ground under grey clouds, as
one comes suddenly on water; for it lay out in misty blue
lakes of men mixed with darker patches, like osiers and
undergrowth, of guns, horses, and wagons. A straight road cut
the landscape in two along its murmuring front.

VETERANS OF THE WAR

It was as though Cadmus had sown the dragon's teeth, not in
orderly furrows but broa