THE VILLAGE AND THE WAR


"Well, have you heard the news?"

It was the landlord of the Blue Boar who spoke. He stopped me in the
village street--if you can call a straggling lane with a score of thatched
cottages and half a dozen barns a street--evidently bursting with great
tidings. He is an old soldier himself, and his views on the war are held in
great esteem. I hadn't heard the news, but, whatever it was, I could see
from the landlord's immense smile that there was nothing to fear.

"Jim has got a commission," said the landlord, and he said it in a tone
that left no doubt that now things would begin to move. For Jim is his son,
a sergeant-major in the artillery, who has been out at the front ever since
Mons.

The news has created quite a sensation. But we are getting so used to
sensations now that we are becoming _blasé_. There has never been such a
year of wonders in the memory of any one living. The other day thousands of
soldiers from the great camp ten miles away descended on our "terrain"--I
think that's the word--and had a tremendous two-days' battle in the hills
about us. They broke through the hedges, and slept in the cornfields, and
ravished the apple-trees in my orchard, and raided the cottagers for tea,
and tramped to and fro in our street and gave us the time of our lives.

"_I_ never seed such a sight in _my_ life," said old Benjamin to me in the