tory for which they had striven in vain was
near at hand at last.

"We'll have peace before Christmas." So they said to me as they went.

That "Peace before Christmas"! It has fluttered, a delusive vision,
before our men since the start. "Is it true that the cavalry are
through?" I suppose that was another delusion, that riding down of a
flying foe by horsemen. But it was not only the stretcher-bearers who
clung to it.

We saw our friends no more after they disappeared into the smoking
furnace of the front. They were scattered here and there among the
dressing-stations in the fighting area. Many of them, I suppose,
stayed there, struck down at last, ending their days in France as
they began them, with the sound of the guns in their ears. Others,
perhaps, drifted back to England more hopelessly broken than ever.
They must be walking our streets now with silver badges on the lapels
of their coats, and we, who are much meaner men, should take our hats
off to them. A few may be toiling still, where the fighting is
thickest, the last remnants of the "Old Contemptibles."

Their places in the camp and their work on the quays were taken by
others, men disabled or broken in the later fights when the new
armies won their glory. The character of the camp changed. We became
more respectable than we were in the old days. No one any longer
spoke of us as a "bad lot," or called us "a tough crowd." Perhaps we
were not so tough. Certainly we cannot have been tougher than the men
who made good in those first terrific days, who continued to make
good long after they could fight no more, staggering through the
Somme mud with laden stretchers. They grumbled and groused. They
blasphemed constantly. They drank when they could. They wanted no
"---- parson" among them. But they were men, unconquered and
unconquerable.

CHAPTER XV

MY THIRD CAMP

At the front, the actual front where the fighting is, imagination
runs riot in devising place names, and military maps recognise woods,
hills, and roads by their new titles. At the bases a severer spirit
holds sway. I recollect one curious and disagreeable camp which was
called, colloquially and officially, Cinder City. Otherwise camps
were known by numbers or at best by the French names of the districts
in which they were situated. I thought I had hit on another exception
to this rule when I first heard of this camp. It seemed natural to
have called a camp after one of our generals. I