hought of tragic
losses or forlorn battles in which they might fall. In the quietude of
the hotel garden, a little square plot of grass bordered by flower-beds,
I had had strange conversations with boys who had revealed their souls a
little, after dinner in the darkness, their faces bared now and then by
the light of cigarettes or the flare of a match.

"Death is nothing," said one young officer just down from the Somme
fields for a week's rest-cure for jangled nerves. "I don't care a
damn for death; but it's the waiting for it, the devilishness of its
uncertainty, the sight of one's pals blown to bits about one, and the
animal fear under shell-fire, that break one's pluck... My nerves are
like fiddle-strings."

In that garden, other men, with a queer laugh now and then between their
stories, had told me their experiences in shell-craters and ditches
under frightful fire which had "wiped out" their platoons or companies.
A bedraggled stork, the inseparable companion of a waddling gull, used
to listen to the conferences, with one leg tucked under his wing, and
its head on one side, with one watchful, beady eye fixed on the figures
in khaki--until suddenly it would clap its long bill rapidly in a
wonderful imitation of machine-gun fire--"Curse the bloody bird!" said
officers startled by this evil and reminiscent noise--and caper with
ridiculous postures round the imperturbable gull... Beyond the lines,
from the dining-room, would come the babble of many tongues and the
laughter of officers telling stories against one another over their
bottles of wine, served by Gaston the head-waiter, between our
discussions on strategy--he was a strategist by virtue of service in the
trenches and several wounds--or by "Von Tirpitz," an older, whiskered
man, or by Joseph, who had a high, cackling laugh and strong views
against the fair sex, and the inevitable cry, "C'est la guerre!" when
officers complained of the service... There had been merry parties in
this room, crowded with the ghosts of many heroic fellows, but it was a
gloomy gathering on that evening at the end of March when we sat there
for the last time. There were there officers who had lost their towns,
and "Dadoses" (Deputy Assistant Director of Ordnance Supplies) whose
stores had gone up in smoke and flame, and a few cavalry officers back
from special leave and appalled by what had happened in their absence,
and a group of Y.M.C.A. officials who had escaped by the skin of