That is rank superstition, you say?  Aye, it may be!  But in the region of the front everyone you meet has become superstitious, if that is the word you choose.  That is especially true of the soldiers.  Every man at the front, it seemed to me, was a fatalist.  What is to be will be, they say.  It is certain that this feeling has helped to make them indifferent to danger, almost, indeed, contemptuous of it.  And in France, I was told, almost everywhere there were shrines in which figures of Christ or of His Mother had survived the most furious shelling.  All the world knows, too, how, at Rheims, where the great Cathedral has been shattered in the wickedest and most wanton of all the crimes of that sort that the Germans have to their account, the statue of Jeanne d’Arc, who saved France long ago, stands untouched.

How is a man to account for such things as that?  Is he to put them down to chance, to luck, to a blind fate?  I, for one, cannot do so, nor will I try to learn to do it.

Fate, to be sure, is a strange thing, as my friends the soldiers know so well.  But there is a difference between fate, or chance, and the sort of force that preserves statues like those I have named.  A man never knows his luck; he does well not to brood upon it.  I remember the case of a chap I knew, who was out for nearly three years, taking part in great battles from Mons to Arras.  He was scratched once or twice, but was never even really wounded badly enough to go to hospital.  He went to London, at last, on leave, and within an hour of the time when he stepped from his train at Charing Cross he was struck by a ’bus and killed.  And there was the strange ease of my friend, Tamson, the baker, of which I told you earlier.  No—­a man never knows his fate!

So it seemed to me, as we drove toward Arras, and watched that mysterious figure, that God Himself had chosen to leave it there, as a sign and a warning and a promise all at once.  There was no sign of life, at first, when we came into the town.  Silence brooded over the ruins.  We stopped to have a look around in that scene of desolation, and as the motors throbbed beneath the hoods it seemed to me the noise they made was close to being blasphemous.  We were right under that hanging figure of the Virgin and of Christ, and to have left the silence unbroken would have been more seemly.

But it was not long before the silence of the town was broken by another sound.  It was marching men we heard, but they were scuffling with their feet as they came; they had not the rhythmic tread of most of the British troops we had encountered.  Nor were these men, when they swung into sight, coming around a pile of ruins, just like any British troops we had seen.  I recognized them as once as Australians—­ Kangaroos, as their mates in other divisions called them—­by the way their campaign hats were looped up at one side.  These were the first Australian troops I had seen since I had sailed from Sydney, in the early days of the war, nearly three years before.  Three years!  To think of it—­and of what those years had seen!