was escorted by a colonel and two other officers.
My friend nodded towards her.

"Do you know her?" he asked.

I shook my head. He named a very eminent novelist.

"Doing a tour of the Expeditionary Force, I expect," he said. "I used
to review her books before the war. I'd rather like to review the
one she'll write about this. Once"--he added this reminiscence after
a pause--"I dined in her company in London."

He was a journalist before he enlisted. If he survives he will no
doubt write a book, a new _De Profundis_, and it ought to be worth
reading.

I went one afternoon to a railway station to say good-bye to some
friends of mine who were off to the firing-line. Troops usually
left the base where I was then stationed at 10 or 11 o'clock at
night and we did not go to see them off. This party--they were
Canadians--started in the afternoon and from an unusual station. The
scene was familiar enough. There was a long train, for the most part
goods waggons. There were hundreds of laughing men, and a buffet
where ladies--those ladies who somehow never fail--gave tea and cocoa
to waiting crowds. Sergeants served out rations for the journey.
Officers struggled to get their kit into compartments already
overfull.

I made my way slowly along the platform, looking for my friends. In
halting European French I answered inquiries made of me in fluent
Canadian French by a soldier of Quebec. I came on a man who must
have been a full-blooded Indian standing by himself, staring straight
in front of him with wholly emotionless eyes. On every side of me I
heard the curious Canadian intonation of English speech.

I found my friends at last. They were settling down with others whom
I did not know into a waggon labelled "_Chevaux_, 8; _Hommes_, 40." I
do not know how eight horses would have liked a two-days journey in
that waggon. The forty men were cheerfully determined to make the
best of things. I condoled and sympathised.

From a far corner of the waggon came a voice quoting a line of
Virgil. "_Forsitan et illis olim meminisse juvabit_." It is a common
tag, of course, but I did not expect to hear it then and there. The
speaker was a boy, smooth-faced, gentle-looking. In what school of
what remote province did he learn to construe and repeats bits of the
_AEneid_? With the French-Canadians, the Indian, and all the rest of
them, he, with his pathetic little scrap of Latin, was a private in
the army of the empire.

It was my ex