red on this September afternoon.
The smell of Flemish villages--a mingled odor of sun-baked thatch and
bakeries and manure heaps and cows and ancient vapors stored up through
the centuries--was overborne by a new and more pungent aroma which crept
over the fields with the evening haze.

It was a sad, melancholy smell, telling of corruption and death. It
was the first breath of autumn, and I shivered a little. Must there
be another winter of war? The old misery of darkness and dampness was
creeping up through the splendor of September sunshine.

Those soldiers did not seem to smell it, or, if their nostrils were
keen, to mind its menace--those soldiers who came marching down the
road, with tanned faces. How fine they looked, and how hard, and how
cheerful, with their lot! Speak to them separately and every man would
"grouse" at the duration of the war and swear that he was "fed up" with
it. Homesickness assailed them at times with a deadly nostalgia. The
hammering of shell-fire, which takes its daily toll, spoiled their
temper and shook their nerves, as far as a British soldier had
any nerves, which I used to sometimes doubt, until I saw again the
shell-shock cases.

But again I heard their laughter and an old song whistled vilely out of
tune, but cheerful to the tramp of their feet. They were going back to
the trenches after a spell in a rest-camp, to the same old business of
whizz-bangs and pip-squeaks, and dugouts, and the smell of wet clay
and chloride of lime, and the life of earth-men who once belonged to
a civilization which had passed. And they went whistling on their way,
because it was the very best thing to do.

One picked up the old landmarks again, and got back into the "feel"
of the war zone. There were the five old windmills of Cassel that wave
their arms up the hill road, and the estaminets by which one found one's
way down country lanes--"The Veritable Cuckoo" and "The Lost Corner" and
"The Flower of the Fields"--and the first smashed roofs and broken barns
which led to the area of constant shell-fire. Ugh!

So it was still going on, this bloody murder! There were some more
cottages down in the village, where we had tea a month before. And in
the market-place of a sleepy old town the windows were mostly broken
and some shops had gone into dust and ashes. That was new since we last
passed this way.

London was only seven hours away, but the hours on leave there seemed
a year ago already. The men wh