ives, but we did not mingle with
them. Some escaped northward, some were caught in the torrent of peasantry
that swept along the main roads; many gave themselves into the hands of
the soldiery and were sent northward. Many of the men were impressed. But
we kept away from these things; we had brought no money to bribe a passage
north, and I feared for my lady at the hands of these conscript crowds. We
had landed at Salerno, and we had been turned back from Cava, and we had
tried to cross towards Taranto by a pass over Mount Alburno, but we had
been driven back for want of food, and so we had come down among the
marshes by Paestum, where those great temples stand alone. I had some
vague idea that by Paestum it might be possible to find a boat or
something, and take once more to sea. And there it was the battle overtook
us.

"A sort of soul-blindness had me. Plainly I could see that we were being
hemmed in; that the great net of that giant Warfare had us in its toils.
Many times we had seen the levies that had come down from the north going
to and fro, and had come upon them in the distance amidst the mountains
making ways for the ammunition and preparing the mounting of the guns.
Once we fancied they had fired at us, taking us for spies--at any rate a
shot had gone shuddering over us. Several times we had hidden in woods
from hovering aeroplanes.

"But all these things do not matter now, these nights of flight and
pain... We were in an open place near those great temples at Paestum, at
last, on a blank stony place dotted with spiky bushes, empty and desolate
and so flat that a grove of eucalyptus far away showed to the feet of its
stems. How I can see it! My lady was sitting down under a bush resting a
little, for she was very weak and weary, and I was standing up watching to
see if I could tell the distance of the firing that came and went. They
were still, you know, fighting far from each other, with these terrible
new weapons that had never before been used: guns that would carry beyond
sight, and aeroplanes that would do----What _they_ would do no man
could foretell.

"I knew that we were between the two armies, and that they drew together.
I knew we were in danger, and that we could not stop there and rest!

"Though all those things were in my mind, they were in the background.
They seemed to be affairs beyond our concern. Chiefly, I was thinking of
my lady. An aching distress filled me. For the first time she had