after long and dreadful years, with the Army of Occupation beyond the
Rhine.




III


In the very early days we lived in a small old house, called by
courtesy a chateau, in the village of Tatinghem, near General
Headquarters at St.-Omer. (Afterward we shifted our quarters from time
to time, according to the drift of battle and our convenience.) It was
very peaceful there amid fields of standing corn, where peasant women
worked while their men were fighting, but in the motor-cars supplied
us by the army (with military drivers, all complete) it was a quick
ride over Cassel Hill to the edge of the Ypres salient and the
farthest point where any car could go without being seen by a watchful
enemy and blown to bits at a signal to the guns. Then we walked, up
sinister roads, or along communication trenches, to the fire-step in
the front line, or into places like "Plug Street" wood and Kemmel
village, and the ruins of Vermelles, and the lines by Neuve Chapelle--
the training-schools of British armies--where always birds of death
were on the wing, screaming with high and rising notes before coming
to earth with the cough that killed. . . After hours in those hiding-
places where boys of the New Army were learning the lessons of war in
dugouts and ditches under the range of German guns, back again to the
little white chateau at Tatinghem, with a sweet scent of flowers from
the fields, and nightingales singing in the woods and a bell tinkling
for Benediction in the old church tower beyond our gate.