, and at night my window was lighted by distant
shell-fire, and I gazed out to a sky of darkness rent by vivid flashes,
bursts of red flame, and rockets rising high. The priests used to tap
at my door when I came back from the battlefields all muddy, with a
slime-plastered face, writing furiously, and an old padre used to plague
me like that, saying:

"What news? It goes well, eh? Not too well, perhaps! Alas! it is a
slaughter on both sides."

"It is all your fault," I said once, chaffingly, to get rid of him. "You
do not pray enough."

He grasped my wrist with his skinny old hand.

"Monsieur," he whispered, "after eighty years I nearly lose my faith
in God. That is terrible, is it not? Why does not God give us victory?
Alas! perhaps we have sinned too much!"

One needed great faith for courage then, and my courage (never much to
boast about) ebbed low those days, when I agonized over our losses and
saw the suffering of our men and those foul swamps where the bodies of
our boys lay in pools of slime, vividly colored by the metallic vapors
of high explosives, beside the gashed tree-stumps; and the mangled
corpses of Germans who had died outside their pill-boxes; and when I saw
dead horses on the roads out of Ypres, and transport drivers dead beside
their broken wagons, and officers of ours with the look of doomed men,
nerve-shaken, soul-stricken, in captured blockhouses, where I took a nip
of whisky with them now and then before they attacked again; and groups
of dazed prisoners coming down the tracks through their own harrowing
fire; and always, always, streams of wounded by tens of thousands.

There was an old mill-house near Vlamertinghe, beyond Goldfish Chateau,
which was made into a casualty clearing station, and scores of times
when I passed it I saw it crowded with the "walking wounded," who had
trudged down from the fighting-line, taking eleven hours, fourteen hours
sometimes, to get so far. They were no longer "cheerful" like the gay
lads who came lightly wounded out of earlier battles, glad of life,
excited by their luck. They were silent, shivering, stricken men; boys
in age, but old and weary in the knowledge of war. The slime of the
battlefields had engulfed them. Their clothes were plastered to their
bodies. Their faces and hands were coated with that whitish clay. Their
steel hats and rifles were caked with it. Their eyes, brooding, were
strangely alive in those corpselike figures of mud who huddled