what the general would have said if he had known!

We finished our forty-eight hours' duty and returned once more to
Zyradow. I was always loth to leave Radzivilow. The work there was
splendid, and there more than anywhere else I have been to one feels the
war as a High Adventure.

War would be the most glorious game in the world if it were not for the
killing and wounding. In it one tastes the joy of comradeship to the
full, the taking and giving, and helping and being helped in a way that
would be impossible to conceive in the ordinary world. At Radzivilow,
too, one could see the poetry of war, the zest of the frosty mornings,
and the delight of the camp-fire at night, the warm, clean smell of the
horses tethered everywhere, the keen hunger, the rough food sweetened by
the sauce of danger, the riding out in high hope in the morning; even
the returning wounded in the evening did not seem altogether such a bad
thing out there. One has to die some time, and the Russian peasants
esteem it a high honour to die for their "little Mother" as they call
their country. The vision of the High Adventure is not often vouchsafed
to one, but it is a good thing to have had it--it carries one through
many a night at the shambles. Radzivilow is the only place it came to
me. In Belgium one's heart was wrung by the poignancy of it all, its
littleness and defencelessness; in Lodz one could see nothing for the
squalor and "frightfulness"; in other places the ruined villages, the
flight of the dazed, terrified peasants show one of the darkest sides of
war.

* * * * *

It was New Year's Eve when we returned to Zyradow, and found ourselves
billeted in a new house where there was not only a bed each, but a
bathroom and a bath. Imagine what that meant to people who had not
undressed at night for more than three weeks.

Midnight struck as we were having supper, and we drank the health of the
New Year in many glasses of tea. What would the lifted veil of time
disclose in this momentous year just opening for us?

It did not begin particularly auspiciously for me, for within the first
few days of it I got a wound in the leg from a bit of shrapnel, was
nearly killed by a bomb from a German Taube, and caught a very bad chill
and had to go to bed with pleurisy--all of which happenings gave me
leisure to write this little account of my adventures.

The bomb from the Taube was certainly the nearest escape I am ever