ilies came
back. Once more a skirt could be seen, even a few silk stockings
occasionally tripping about.

Peronne was now like a polished skeleton--very clean, but very
brittle: a little breeze, and whole houses would tumble to bits. I
started painting, one day, a little picture from the hall of the
College for Young Ladies. When I went the next day I found my point of
view had been raised several feet: the top walls had come down. But (p. 038)
here again they had patched up a great big house as a club. It was
airy, not intentionally so, but on a hot day it was ideal, with its
view down over the Somme. Bully-beef pie, cheese and beer--if one
could only have had French coffee instead of that terrible black
mixture imported from England, things would have been more perfectly
complete.

About August, a burial party worked round Thiepval. Lieutenant Clark
was in charge of it, a sturdy little Scot. During the month or so they
worked there, they dug up, identified and re-buried thousands of
bodies. Some could not be identified, and what was found on these in
the way of money, knives, etc., was considered fair spoil for the
burial party.

Often, coming down Thiepval Hill in the evening, everything golden in
the sunlight, one would come across a little group of men, sitting by
the side of the battered Hill Road, counting out and dividing the
spoils of the day. It was a sordid sight, but for a non-combatant job,
to be a member of a burial party was certainly not a pleasant one, and
I do not think anyone could grudge them whatever pennies they made,
and most of them would have to go back in the trenches when their
burial party disbanded.

Down in the Valley of the Ancre, just beside the Thiepval Hill Road,
there was a great colony of Indians. They were all Catholics, and were
headed by an old padre who had worked in India for forty-five years--a
fine old fellow. He held wonderful services each Sunday afternoon on
the side of the Hill in the open air; he had an altar put up with
wonderful coloured draperies behind it, which hung from a structure
about thirty feet high. In the mornings, it was a very beautiful (p. 039)
sight to see these nut-brown men washing themselves and their bronze
vessels among the reeds in the Ancre; one could hardly believe one was
in France. And where was one? Surely in a place and seeing a life that
never existed before, and never will again. The rapidity with which
these Indians (they were a