eased and bedraggled. After that he asked if he
could get out downstairs, and I told him the door was unlocked.

He hesitated for a moment before leaving my room.

"I am sorry to have given you all this trouble. It was very decent of
you. Many thanks."

The boy was a gentleman when sober. I wonder if he died at Pozieres,
or farther on by the Butte de Warlencourt... A week later I saw an
advertisement in an Amiens paper: "Horse found. Brown, with white sock
on right foreleg. Apply--"

I have a fancy it was the horse for which we had searched in the rain.

XII

The quickest way to the cathedral is down a turning on the right-hand
side of the Street of the Three Pebbles. Charlie's bar was on the
left-hand side of the street, always crowded after six o'clock by
officers of every regiment, drinking egg-nogs, Martinis, Bronxes, sherry
cobblers, and other liquids, which helped men marvelously to forget the
beastliness of war, and gave them the gift of laughter, and made
them careless of the battles which would have to be fought. Young
staff-officers were there, explaining carefully how hard worked they
were and how often they went under shell-fire. The fighting officers,
English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, jeered at them, laughed hugely at the
latest story of mirthful horror, arranged rendezvous at the Godebert
restaurant, where they would see the beautiful Marguerite (until she
transferred to la cathedrale in the same street) and our checks which
Charlie cashed at a discount, with a noble faith in British honesty,
not often, as he told me, being hurt by a "stumor." Charlie's bar was
wrecked by shell-fire afterward, and he went to Abbeville and set up a
more important establishment, which was wrecked, too, in a fierce air
raid, before the paint was dry on the walls.

The cathedral was a shrine to which many men and women went all through
the war, called into its white halls by the spirit of beauty which dwelt
there, and by its silence and peace. The great west door was screened
from bomb-splinters by sand-bags piled high, and inside there were other
walls of sand-bags closing in the sanctuary and some of the windows.
But these signs of war did not spoil the majesty of the tall columns
and high roof, nor the loveliness of the sculptured flowers below the
clerestory arches, nor the spiritual mystery of those great, dim aisles,
where light flickered and shadows lurked, and the ghosts of history came
out of their tomb