-an accident of war.)

A little man on deck came up to me and said, in a melancholy way, "You
know who I am, don't you, sir?"

I hadn't the least idea who he was--this little ginger--haired
soldier with a wizened and wistful face. But I saw that he wore the
claret-colored ribbon of the V. C. on his khaki tunic. He gave me his
name, and said the papers had "done him proud," and that they had made
a lot of him at home--presentations, receptions, speeches, Lord Mayor's
addresses, cheering crowds, and all that. He was one of our Heroes,
though one couldn't tell it by the look of him.

"Now I'm going back to the trenches," he said, gloomily. "Same old
business and one of the crowd again." He was suffering from the reaction
of popular idolatry. He felt hipped because no one made a fuss of him
now or bothered about his claret-colored ribbon. The staff-officers,
chaplains, brigade majors, regimental officers, and army nurses were
more interested in an airship, a silver fish with shining gills and a
humming song in its stomach.

France... and the beginning of what the little V. C. had called "the
same old business." There was the long fleet of motor-ambulances as a
reminder of the ultimate business of all those young men in khaki whom
I had seen drilling in the Embankment gardens and shouldering their way
down the Strand.

Some stretchers were being carried to the lift which goes down to the
deck of the hospital-ship, on which an officer was ticking off each
wounded body after a glance at the label tied to the man's tunic.
Several young officers lay under the blankets on those stretchers and
one of them caught my eye and smiled as I looked down upon him. The same
old business and the same old pluck.

I motored down the long, straight roads of France eastward, toward that
network of lines which are the end of all journeys after a few days'
leave, home and back again. The same old sights and sounds and smells
which, as long as memory lasts, to men who had the luck to live through
the war, will haunt them for the rest of life, and speak of Flanders.

The harvest was nearly gathered in, and where, a week or two before,
there had been fields of high, bronzed corn there were now long
stretches of stubbled ground waiting for the plow. The wheat-sheaves had
been piled into stacks or, from many great fields, carted away to
the red-roofed barns below the black old windmills whose sails were
motionless because no breath of air stir