nd it was like being haunted by a specter all day long. One
laughed, but the specter echoed one's laughter and said, "Wait!" The
mild sunshine of those spring days was pleasant to one's spirit in
the woods above La Fere, and in fields where machine-guns chattered a
little, while overhead our airplanes dodged German "Archies." But the
specter chilled one's blood at the reminder of vast masses of field-gray
men drawing nearer to our lines in overwhelming numbers. I motored
to many parts of the front, and my companion sometimes was a little
Frenchman who had lost a leg in the war--D'Artagnan with a wooden peg,
most valiant, most gay. Along the way he recited the poems of Ronsard.
At the journey's end one day he sang old French chansons, in an English
mess, within gunshot of the German lines. He climbed up a tree and gazed
at the German positions, and made sketches while he hummed little tunes
and said between them, "Ah, les sacres Boches!.. . If only I could fight
again!"

I remember a pleasant dinner in the old town of Noyon, in a little
restaurant where two pretty girls waited. They had come from Paris with
their parents to start this business, now that Noyon was safe. (Safe,
O Lord!) And everything was very dainty and clean. At dinner that night
there was a hostile air raid overhead. Bombs crashed. But the girls were
brave. One of them volunteered to go with an officer across the square
to show him the way to the A.P.M., from where he had to get a pass to
stay for dinner. Shrapnel bullets were whipping the flagstones of
the Grande Place, from anti-aircraft guns. The officer wore his steel
helmet. The girl was going out without any hat above her braided hair.
We did not let her go, and the officer had another guide. One night I
brought my brother to the place from his battery near St. Quentin. We
dined well, slept well.

"Noyon is a good spot," he said. "I shall come here again when you give
me a lift."

A few days later my brother was firing at masses of Germans with open
sights, and the British army was in a full-tide retreat, and the junior
officer who had played his gramophone was dead, with other officers
and men of that battery. When I next passed through Noyon shells were
falling into it, and later I saw it in ruins, with the glory of the
Romanesque cathedral sadly scarred. I have ofttimes wondered what
happened to the little family in the old hotel.

So March 21st came, as we knew it would come, even to the v