he Forces. For I
know the British soldier and--to know him is to love him. Do you
understand?" he added, as he nodded in the direction the men had gone.

As I looked at him, there came into my mind the haunting lines of
Tennyson's "Ulysses."

"Yes," I said, "I understand."

FOOTNOTES:

[13] Pale.

[14] Confusing.

[15] Blaze.

[16] Empty.

[17] Smart.

[18] Welsh for a singing meeting.

[19] Mad.

[20] Imbecile.

[21] A mole.

[22] Trembled.

[23] Screaming.

XX

THE FUGITIVES

"But pray that your flight be not in the winter."

Some four or five miles north of Bailleul, where the _douane_ posts mark
the marches of the Franco-Belgian frontier, is the village of Locre.
Here the clay of the plains gives way to a wooded ridge of low hills,
through which the road drives a deep cutting, laying bare the age of the
earth in a chronology of greensand and limestone. Beyond the ridge lies
another plain, and there it was that on a clammy winter's day I came
upon two lonely wayfarers. The fields and hedgerows were rheumy with
moisture which dripped from every bent and twig. The hedges were full of
the dead wood of the departed autumn, and on a decrepit creeper hung a
few ragged wisps of Old Man's Beard. The only touch of colour in the
landscape was the vinous purple of the twigs, and a few green leaves of
privet from which rose spikes of berries black as crape. Not a living
thing appeared, and the secret promises of spring were so remote as to
seem incredible.

The man and woman were Flemish of the peasant class; the man, gnarled
like an old oak, the purple clots in the veins of his wrists betraying
the senility of his arteries; the woman, withered as though all the sap
had gone out of her blood. She had a rope round her waist, to the other
end of which a small cart was attached; under the cart, harnessed to the
axle, two dogs panted painfully with their tongues out; behind the cart
the man pushed. It contained a disorderly freight: a large feather-bed,
a copper cauldron, a bird-cage, a mattock, a clock curiously carved, a
spinning-wheel with a distaff impoverished of flax, and some kitchen
utensils, which, as the woman stumbled and the cart lurched, clanked
together.

As our car drew up, they stopped, the woman holding her hands to her
side as though to recover breath.

"Who are you? Where do you come from?" said my companion, a French
officer.

They stared uncomprehendingly.

He