war. More comfort about it, if you're not in the trenches."
Wickham Brand took me through the courtyard and mentioned that the Colonel had come up from St. Omer.
"Now we're sure to beat the Boche," he said. "Listen!"
From a room to the left of the courtyard came the sound of a flute playing one of Bach's minuets, very sweetly, with an old-fashioned grace.
"A wonderful Army of ours!" said Brand. "I can't imagine a German colonel of the Staff playing seventeenth-century music on a bit of ivory, while the enemy is fighting like a tiger at bay."
"Perhaps that's our strength," I answered. "Our amateurs refuse to take the war too seriously. I know a young Gunner Major who travels a banjo in his limber, and at Cambrai I saw fellows playing chuck-penny within ten yards of their pals' dead bodies—a pile of them."
The Colonel saw us through his window and waved his flute at us. When I went into the room, after a salute at the doorway, I saw that he had already littered it with artistic untidiness—sheets of torn music, water-*colour sketches, books of poetry, and an array of splendid shining boots; of which a pair stood on the mahogany sideboard.
"A beautiful little passage this," said Colonel Lavington, smiling at me over the flute, which he put to his lips again. He played a bar or two of old world melody, and said, "Isn't that perfect? Can't you see the little ladies in their puffed brocades and high-heeled shoes!"
He had his faun-like look, his clean-shaven face with long nose and thin, humorous mouth, lighted up by his dark smiling eyes.
"Not a bad headquarters," he said, putting down the flute again. "If we can only stay here a little while, instead of having to jog on again. There's an excellent
