one of those nasty "bombs," which were really eight-inch shells, but the old lady did not worry, and felt safe when the door was shut.
Outside Courtrai, when I left, lay some khaki figures in a mush of blood. They were lads whom I had seen unloading ammunition that morning on the bank of the canal. One had asked me for a light, and said, "What's all this peace-talk?. . . Any chance?" A big chance, I had told him. Home for Christmas, certain sure this time. The boy's eyes had lighted up for a moment, quicker than the match which he held in the cup of his hands.
"Jesus! Back for good; eh?"
Then the light went out of his eyes as the match flared up.
"We've heard that tale, a score of times. 'The Germans are weakening. The Huns 'ave 'ad enough!. . .' Newspaper talk. A man would be a mug"
Now the boy lay in the mud, with half his body blown away. . . . I was glad to get back to Lille for a spell, where there were no dead bodies in the roads. And the Colonel's news, straight from G.H.Q., which—surely—were not playing up the old false optimism again!—helped one to hope that perhaps in a week or two the last boys of our race, the lucky ones, would be reprieved from that kind of bloody death, which I had seen so often, so long, so heaped up in many fields of France and Flanders, where the flower of our youth was killed.
Dr. Small was excited by the hope brought back by Colonel Lavington. He sought me out in my billet, chez Madame Chéri, and begged me to take a walk with him. It was a moonlight night, but no double throb of a German air-engine came booming over Lille. He walked at a hard pace, with the collar of his "British warm" tucked up to his ears, and talked in a queer disjointed mono-
