ay hope as a
Christian should, there is wide room for hope in your future. You
shall see the seasons move over your garden, you shall busy yourself
with your home, and speak and share with your neighbours innumerable
small joys, and find consolation and beauty, and at last rest, in and
around the church whose spire you see from your home. You, senor,
with your son perhaps growing up, perhaps wearing already some sword
that you wore once, you can turn back to your memories or look with
hope to the future with equal ease.

The man that I met in Croisilles had none of these things at all. He
had that one hope only.

Do not, I pray you, by your voice or vote, or by any power or
influence that you have, do anything to take away from this poor old
Frenchman the only little hope he has left. The more trivial his odd
hope appears to you compared with your own high hopes that come so
easily to you amongst all your fields and houses, the more cruel a
thing must it be to take it from him.

I learned many things in Croisilles, and the last of them is this
strange one the old man taught me. I turned and shook hands with him
and said good-bye, for I wished to see again our old front line that
we used to hold over the hill, now empty, silent at last. "The Boche
is defeated," I said.

"Vaincu, vaincu," he repeated. And I left him with something almost
like happiness looking out of his tearful eyes.

Bermondsey _versus_ Wurtemburg

The trees grew thinner and thinner along the road, then ceased
altogether, and suddenly we saw Albert in the wood of the ghosts of
murdered trees, all grey and deserted.

Descending into Albert past trees in their agony we came all at once
on the houses. You did not see them far off as in other cities; we
came on them all at once as you come on a corpse in the grass.

We stopped and stood by a house that was covered with plaster marked
off to look like great stones, its pitiful pretence laid bare, the
slates gone and the rooms gone, the plaster all pitted with shrapnel.
Near it lay an iron railing, a hand-rail blown there from the railway
bridge; a shrapnel bullet had passed through its twisted stem as
though it had gone through butter. And beside the hand-rail lay one
of the great steel supports of the bridge that had floated there upon
some flaming draught; the end of it bent and splayed as though it had
been a slender cane that someone had shoved too hard into the earth.

There had been