grains. They would have looked upon it as sheer weakness to exhibit any
interest in the doings even of their neighbours.

The battle of the Somme had begun about nine weeks before when this
particular train, carrying the daily instalment of men on leave from it,
began to wind its way in past the endless back-gardens and yellow brick
houses, every one the replica of the next, and the numberless villa
chimneys and chimney-pots which fence the southern approaches of the
great capital. They are tight, compact little fortresses, those English
villas, each jealously defended against its neighbour and the whole
world by the sentiment within, even more than by the high brick wall
around it. But if they were all rigidly separate from each other, there
was one thing that bound them all together just for that moment.

It happened in every cottage garden, in every street that rattled past
underneath the railway bridges, in every slum-yard, from every window,
upper and lower. As the leave train passed the people all for the moment
dropped whatever they were doing and ran to wave a hand at it. The
children in every garden dropped their games and ran to the fence and
clambered up to wave these tired men out of sight. The servant at the
upper window let her work go and waved; the mother of the family and the
girls in the sitting-room downstairs came to the window and waved; the
woman washing in the tub in the back-yard straightened herself up and
waved; the little grocer out with his wife and the perambulator waved,
and the wife waved, and the infant in the perambulator waved; the boys
playing pitch-and-toss on the pavement ran towards the railway bridge
and waved; the young lady out for a walk with her young man waved--not
at all a suppressed welcome, quite the reverse of half-hearted; the
young man waved, much more demurely, but still he did wave. The flapper
on the lawn threw down her tennis-racket and simply flung kisses; and