er, with sphinx-like face and
honest soul--used to trudge along silently, with just a sigh now and
then, or a groan, or a sudden cry of "O God!... O Christ!" It was I,
generally, who spoke those words, and Palmer would say: "Yes... and it's
going to last a long time yet. A long time... It's a question who will
hold out twenty-four hours longer than the other side. France is tired,
more tired than any of us. Will she break first? Somehow I think not.
They are wonderful! Their women have a gallant spirit... How good it is,
the smell of the trees to-night!"

Sometimes we would cross the river and look back at the cathedral, high
and beautiful above the huddle of old, old houses on the quayside,
with a faint light on its pinnacle and buttresses and immense blackness
beyond them.

"Those builders of France loved their work," said Palmer. "There was
always war about the walls of this cathedral, but they went on with it,
stone by stone, without hurry."

We stood there in a long silence, not on one night only, but many times,
and out of those little dark streets below the cathedral of Amiens
came the spirit of history to teach our spirit with wonderment at the
nobility and the brutality of men, and their incurable folly, and their
patience with tyranny.

"When is it all going to end, Palmer, old man?"

"The war, or the folly of men?"

"The war. This cursed war. This bloody war."

"Something will break one day, on our side or the other. Those who hold
out longest and have the best reserves of man-power."

We were starting early next day--before dawn--to see the beginning of
another battle. We walked slowly over the little iron bridge again,
through the vegetable market, where old men and women were unloading
cabbages from a big wagon, then into the dark tunnel of the rue des
Augustins, and so to the little old mansion of Mme. de la Rochefoucauld
in the rue Amiral Courbet. There was a light burning in the window of
the censor's room. In there the colonel was reading The Times in the
Louis Quinze salon, with a grave pucker on his high, thin forehead. He
could not get any grasp of the world's events. There was an attack on
the censor by Northcliffe. Now what did he mean by that? It was really
very unkind of him, after so much civility to him. Charteris would be
furious. He would bang the telephone--but--dear, dear, why should
people be so violent? War correspondents were violent on the slightest
provocation. The world its