use of Jevons I have made them
figure, in the columns of the _Morning Standard_ and elsewhere, with a
superior vividness; even now when I recall them I seem to have lived with
Jevons in Flanders through long periods of time.

I have the proof of my obsession before me in a letter from the editor of
the _Morning Standard_, dated October the twelfth. He says, "We are
interested, of course, in anything relating to Mr. Tasker Jevons, and his
performances seem to have been remarkable. You have written a very fine
account of Melle, which I understand is a small village four and a-half
miles from Ghent. But there are other events--the Fall of Antwerp, for
instance."

Well, we got the story of the Fall of Antwerp all right. But Jimmy wrote
it for me. It was the last thing he did write.

Yes: he had only three weeks of it, all told. He went out on Tuesday,
September the twenty-second, and he came back on Tuesday, October the
thirteenth. It was his infernal luck that he should have had no more of
it.

And yet, I don't know. I don't see how he could have held out much longer
at his pitch of intensity. Three weeks would have been nothing to any
other man. But Jevons could do more with three weeks than another man
could do with a three years' campaign, and he contrived to crowd into his
term the maximum of glory and of risk. And when it was all over it was
less as if Fate had foiled him than as if he had "given" himself three
weeks.

But Jimmy was discontented, and every morning at breakfast we listened to
the most extraordinary lamentations. His job, he said, wasn't at all the
jolly thing it looked. For he was under orders the whole blessed time.
He'd no more freedom, hadn't Jimmy, than that poor devil of a waiter.
He'd got to go or to stay where a fussy old ram of a Colonel sent him. So
here he was in Ghent, an open city, when he wanted to be in Antwerp. He
hadn't been anywhere--anywhere at all. As for what he'd done, he couldn't
see what the fuss was all about. He hadn't done anything. He'd seen a
little fight in a turnip-field, and a little squabble for a bridge you
could blow up to-day and build again to-morrow, and a little tin-pot town
peppered. And look at the war! Just look at the war!

And when we tried to cheer him up with the prospect of a second Waterloo,
the Waterloo that all the war-correspondents said was coming off next
week, he refused to listen to what he called our putrid gabble. There
wouldn't be any Wate