and clamour of so many
thousands, far less their shock and fury," said the Queen. I saw her
lead her valiant horde upon Colchester, and for me the ancient rudeness
of it all was shot through and through with glimpses of the scientific
sacking of Colchester, as I had read of it but a few weeks ago. I saw
the advance of the Roman Governor; the awful slaughter of the British;
the end of the brave Queen who could not brook defeat: the most
heart-stirring episode in English history.

"Thy posterity shall sway!" I recalled the solemn splendour of another
great Queen's passing--that which I had seen with my own eyes while
still a lad at Rugby: the stately gathering of the great ships at
Spithead; the end of Victoria the Good. No more than a step it seemed
from my vision of the unconquerable Boadicea. But to that other
onslaught upon Colchester--to General von Fuechter's slaughter of women
and children and unarmed men in streets of houses whose ashes must be
warm yet--O Lord, how far! I thought. Could it really be that a thousand
years of inviolability had been broken, ended, in those few wild days;
ended for ever?

Lights twinkled now among the nestling houses of the little place where
I was born. They made me think of torches, the clash of arms, the
spacious mediaeval days when Davenham Minster supported a great
monastery, whose lordly abbot owned the land Tarn Regis stood upon.

And then the little lights grew misty and dim in my eyes as glimpses
came of my own early days; of play on that very ridge-side where I sat
now, where I had then romantically sworn friendship with George Stairs
on the eve of my departure for Elstree School, and his leaving with his
father for Canada. How had I kept my vow? Where was George Stairs now?
There was not a foot of that countryside we had not roamed together. My
eyes pricked as I looked and listened. Exactly so, I thought, the
sheep-bells had sounded below Barebarrow when I had lain listening to
them in that low-pitched back bedroom of the Rectory which I had been
proud to hear called "Dick's Room," after my first experience of
sleeping alone.

Then for a space my mind was blank as the dark valley beyond the
village--until thoughts and pictures of recent happenings began to oust
the gentler memories, and I lived over again the mad, wild, tragic week
which culminated in the massacre of the North London trenches. But in
the light of my previous musings I saw these happenings differently,