A road wound over the downs and away round one of their shoulders. A
hush lay over them as though the giants slept, or as though they
guarded in silence their ancient, wonderful history.

The stillness deepened and the dimness of twilight; and just before
colours fade, while shapes can still be distinguished, there came by
the road a farmer leading his Norman horse. High over the horse's
withers his collar pointed with brass made him fantastic and huge and
strange to see in the evening.

They moved together through that mellow light towards where unseen
among the clustered downs the old French farmer's house was sheltered
away.

He was going home at evening humming ``God Save the King.''

The Punishment

An exhalation arose, drawn up by the moon, from an old battlefield
after the passing of years. It came out of very old craters and
gathered from trenches, smoked up from No Man's Land, and the ruins of
farms; it rose from the rottenness of dead brigades, and lay for half
the night over two armies; but at midnight the moon drew it up all
into one phantom and it rose and trailed away eastwards.

It passed over men in grey that were weary of war; it passed over a
land once prosperous, happy and mighty, in which were a people that
were gradually starving; it passed by ancient belfries in which there
were no bells now; it passed over fear and misery and weeping, and so
came to the palace at Potsdam. It was the dead of the night between