itzer,
which was the last shell-burst that I saw.

Good-bye, too, to my English comrades in a group at the doorway: to
Robinson with his poise, his mellowness, his wisdom, his well-balanced
sentences, who had seen the world around from mining camps of the west
to Serbian refugee camps; to "our Gibbs," ever sweet-tempered, writing
his heart out every night in the human wonder of all he saw in burning
sentences that came crowding to his pencil-point which raced on till he
was exhausted, though he always revived at dinner to undertake any
controversy on behalf of a better future for the whole human race; to
blithesome Thomas who will never grow up, making words dance a tune,
quoting Horace in order to forget the shells, all himself with his coat
off and swinging a peasant's scythe; to Philips the urbane, not saying
much but coming to the essential point, our scout and cartographer, who
knew all the places on the map between the Somme and the Rhine and heard
the call of Pittsburgh; to Russell, that pragmatic, upstanding expert in
squadrons and barrages, who saved all our faces as reporters by knowing
news when he saw it, arbiter of mess conversations, whose pungent wit
had a movable zero--luck to them all! May Robinson have a stately
mansion on the Thames where he can study nature at leisure; Gibbs never
want for something to write about; Thomas have six crops of hay a year
to mow and a garden with a different kind of bird nesting in every tree;
Philips a new pipe every day and a private yacht sailing on an ocean of
maps; Russell a home by the sea where he can watch the ships come
in--when the war is over.

It happened that High Visibility had slightly the upper hand over his
gloomy brother the day they bade me _bon voyage_. My last glimpse of the
cathedral showed it clear against the sky; and ahead many miles of rich,
familiar landscape of Picardy and Artois were to unfold before I took
the cross-channel steamer. I knew that I had felt the epic touch of
great events.

THE END

End of Project Gutenberg's My Second Year of the War, by Frederick Palmer

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