sky with their
hands folded behind their heads, in a brown study and careless of
everything that passed.

Away across marshy fields, intersected by pools and rivulets, I saw
our men billeted in French and Flemish farmhouses, of the old post-
and-plaster kind, like those in English villages.

They seemed thoroughly at home, and were chopping wood and
drawing water and cooking stews, and arranging straw beds in the
barns, and busying themselves with all the domestic side of life as
quietly and cheerily as though they were on manoeuvres in
Devonshire or Surrey, where war is only a game without death in the
roar of a gun. Well fed and well clothed, hard as nails, in spite of all
their hardships, they gave me a sense of pride as I watched them, for
the spirit of the old race was in them, and they would stick it through
thick and thin.

I passed that day through the shell-stricken town of. Ypres and
wandered through the great tragedy of the Cloth Hall--that old
splendour in stone which was now a gaunt and ghastly ruin. British
soldiers were buying picture postcards at booths in the market-place,
and none of them seemed to worry because at any moment another
shell might come crashing across the shattered roofs with a new
message of destruction.

Yet on all this journey of mine in the war zone of the British front for at
least 100 kilometres or so there was no thrill or shock of war itself. A
little way off, on some parts of the road men were in the trenches
facing the enemy only a few yards distant from their hiding-places.

The rumble of guns rolled sullenly now and then across the
marshlands, and one knew intellectually, but not instinctively, that if
one's motor-car took the wrong turning and travelled a mile or two
heedlessly, sudden death would call a halt.

And that was the strangeness of it all--the strangeness that startled
me as I drove back to the quietude of the General Headquarters, as
darkness came down upon this low-lying countryside and put its cloak
about the figures of British soldiers moving to their billets, and gave a
ghostliness to the tall, tufted trees, which seemed to come striding
towards my headlights.

In this siege warfare of the trenches there was a deadly stillness
behind the front and a queer absence of war's tumult and turmoil. Yet
all the time it was going on slowly, yard by yard, trench by trench, and
somewhere along the front men were always fighting and dying.

"Gentlemen," said a