one morning as the sun's rim began to peep
above the long dark wood. How easy to recall that morning! I had
brought fifty-three men from the Base, reinforcements for the
Divisional Artillery, and half-believed that the war could not proceed
unless I delivered them to their destination in the shortest possible
time; and my indignant keenness when I reached the village behind the
long dark wood and learned that no one there knew anything about the
two lorries that were to transport my party the remainder of the
journey to the Front! Did I not rouse a frowning town major and two
amazed sergeant-majors before 5 A.M. and demand that they should do
something in the matter? And did not my fifty-three men eventually
complete a triumphant pilgrimage in no fewer than thirteen ammunition
lorries--to find that they and myself had arrived a day earlier than we
were expected? And here was I again in the same stretch of country, and
the British line not so far forward as it had been two years before.

We pitched tents and tethered our horses in the wood, and before
nightfall I walked into the village to look at the spot beneath the
church tower where I had halted my fifty-three men, and to view again
the barn in which I had roused the most helpful of the two
sergeant-majors. Alas for the sentiment! All French villages seem much
alike, with their mud-wall barns and tiled cottages, when you have
passed through scores of them, as I have done since July 1916. I could
not be certain of the building.

Coming back to our camp through the heart of the wood, I chanced upon a
place of worship that only a being of fancy and imagination and
devoutness could have fashioned. Inside a high oval hedge, close-woven
with much patient labour, stood an altar made of banked-up turf,
surmounted by a plain wooden cross. Turf benches to seat a hundred and
fifty worshippers faced the altar. Above, the wind rustled softly
through the branches of tall birches and larch trees, bent over until
they touched, and made one think of Gothic arches. There was wonderful
peace and rest in the place. Some one told me afterwards that the
chaplain of a London Division had built it. It was a happy thought.

* * * * *

In the morning I went with the colonel through the village, and a mile
and a half along a road leading east that for half a mile was lined
with camouflage screens. "The Boche holds the ridge over there,"
remarked the colonel,