“Worth it, do you think?” asked one of them.

“Enormously so.  But it’s a bit of a pull—­going back to that—­ beastliness.  After one knows the meaning of it.”

“It’s because I know that I want to go back,” said another man who had sat very quietly looking at the toe of one of his riding-boots.  “I had a good time in town—­it seemed too good to be true—­but, after all, one has to finish one’s job before one can sit around with an easy mind.  We’ve got to finish our job out there in the stinking trenches.”

8

I suppose even now after all that has been written it is difficult for the imagination of “the man who stayed at home” to realize the life and conditions of the soldiers abroad.  So many phrases which appeared day by day in the newspapers conveyed no more than a vague, uncertain meaning.

“The Front”—­how did it look, that place which was drawn in a jagged black line across the map on the wall?  “General Headquarters”—­what sort of a place was that in which the Commander-in-Chief lived with his staff, directing the operations in the fighting lines?  “An attack was made yesterday upon the enemy’s position at-----.  A line of trenches was carried by assault.”  So ran the officiai bulletin, but the wife of a soldier abroad could not fill in the picture, the father of a young Territorial could not get enough detail upon which his imagination might build.  For all those at home, whose spirits came out to Flanders seeking to get into touch with young men who were fighting for honour’s sake, it was difficult to form any kind of mental vision, giving a clear and true picture of this great adventure in “foreign parts.”

They would have been surprised at the reality, it was to different from all their previous imaginings.  General Headquarters, for instance, was a surprise to those who came to such a place for the first time.  It was not, when I went there some months ago, a very long distance from the fighting lines in these days of long-range guns, but it was a place of strange quietude in which it was easy to forget the actuality of war—­ until one was reminded by sullen far-off rumblings which made the windows tremble, and made men lift their heads a moment to say:  “They are busy out there to-day.”  There were no great movements of troops in the streets.  Most of the soldiers one saw were staff officers, who walked briskly from one building to another with no more than a word and a smile to any friend they met on the way.  Sentries stood outside the doorways of big houses.

Here and there at the street comers was a military policeman, scrutinizing any new-comer in civilian clothes with watchful eyes.  Church bells tinkled for early morning Mass or Benediction.  Through an open window looking out upon a broad courtyard the voices of school children came chanting their A B C in French, as though no war had taken away their fathers.  There was an air of profound peace here.