led, with blood oozing about them, and their entrails smoking.
We made a half-loop around them and then struck straight for the chateau
which was the brigade headquarters. Neither of us spoke now. We were
thoughtful, calculating the chance of getting to that red-brick house
between the shells. It was just dependent on the coincidence of time and
place.

Three men jumped up from a ditch below a brown wall round the chateau
garden and ran hard for the gateway. A shell had pitched quite close
to them. One man laughed as though at a grotesque joke, and fell as he
reached the courtyard. Smoke was rising from the outhouses, and there
was a clatter of tiles and timbers, after an explosive crash.

"It rather looks," said my companion, "as though the Germans knew there
is a party on in that charming house."

It was as good to go on as to go back, and it was never good to go back
before reaching one's objective. That was bad for the discipline of the
courage that is just beyond fear.

Two gunners were killed in the back yard of the chateau, and as we went
in through the gateway a sergeant made a quick jump for a barn as a
shell burst somewhere close. As visitors we hesitated between two ways
into the chateau, and chose the easier; and it was then that I became
dimly aware of hostility against me on the part of a number of officers
in the front hall. The brigade staff was there, grouped under the
banisters. I wondered why, and guessed (rightly, as I found) that the
center of the house might have a better chance of escape than the
rooms on either side, in case of direct hits from those things falling
outside.

It was the brigade major who asked our business. He was a tall, handsome
young man of something over thirty, with the arrogance of a Christ
Church blood.

"Oh, he has come out to see something in Vermelles? A pleasant place for
sightseeing! Meanwhile the Hun is ranging on this house, so he may see
more than he wants."

He turned on his heel and rejoined his group. They all stared in my
direction as though at a curious animal. A very young gentleman--the
general's A. D. C.--made a funny remark at my expense and the others
laughed. Then they ignored me, and I was glad, and made a little study
in the psychology of men awaiting a close call of death. I was perfectly
conscious myself that in a moment or two some of us, perhaps all of us,
might be in a pulp of mangled flesh beneath the ruins of a red-brick
villa--the shell