her sabots as she went back to get the horse. Another girl
came across a bridge. She was precisely of the opposite type,
slender, creamy-skinned, and delicate-featured. She carried a
brand-new broom over her shoulder through that desolation, and
bore herself with the pride and grace of Queen Iseult.

The farm-girl came out leading the horse, and as the two young
things passed they nodded and smiled at each other, with the
delicate tangle of the hop-vines at their feet.

The guns spoke earnestly in the north. That was the Argonne,
where the Crown Prince was busily getting rid of a few
thousands of his father's faithful subjects in order to secure
himself the reversion of his father's throne. No man likes
losing his job, and when at long last the inner history of
this war comes to be written, we may find that the people we
mistook for principals and prime agents were only average
incompetents moving all Hell to avoid dismissal. (For it is
absolutely true that when a man sells his soul to the devil he
does it for the price of half nothing.)

WATCHING THE GUN-FIRE

It must have been a hot fight. A village, wrecked as is usual
along this line, opened on it from a hillside that overlooked
an Italian landscape of carefully drawn hills studded with
small villages--a plain with a road and a river in the
foreground, and an all-revealing afternoon light upon
everything. The hills smoked and shook and bellowed. An
observation-balloon climbed up to see; while an aeroplane
which had nothing to do with the strife, but was merely
training a beginner, ducked and swooped on the edge of the
plain. Two rose-pink pillars of crumbled masonry, guarding
some carefully trimmed evergreens on a lawn half buried in
rubbish, represented an hotel where the Crown Prince had once
stayed. All up the hillside to our right the foundations of
houses lay out, like a bit of tripe, with the sunshine in
their square hollows. Suddenly a band began to play up the
hill among some trees; and an officer of local Guards in the
new steel anti-shrapnel helmet, which is like the seventeenth
century sallet, suggested that we should climb and get a
better view. He was a kindly man, and in speaking English had
discovered (as I do when speaking French) that it is simpler
to stick to one gender. His choice was the feminine, and the
Boche described as "she" throughout made me think better of
myself, which is the essence of friendship. We climbed a
f