“And how far from that are the German trenches?” I asked nervously.

“Not very far,” he said blithely.  “Near enough to be interesting.”

On and on.  Here was a barn.

“Is this the town?” I asked feebly.

“Not yet.  A little farther!”

I was limping, drenched, irritable.  But now and then the absurdity of my situation overcame me and I laughed.  Water ran down my head and off my nose, trickled down my neck under my coat.  I felt like a great sponge.  And suddenly I remembered my hat.

“I feel sure,” I said, stopping still in the road, “that the chauffeur will go inside the car out of the rain and sit on my hat.”

The officer thought this very likely.  I felt extremely bitter about it.  The more I thought of it the more I was convinced that he was exactly the sort of chauffeur who would get into a car and sit on an only hat.

At last we came to the town—­to what had been a town.  It was a town no longer.  Walls without roofs, roofs almost without walls.  Here and there only a chimney standing of what had been a home; a street so torn up by shells that walking was almost impossible—­full of shell-holes that had become graves.  There were now no lights, not even soldiers.  In the silence our footsteps re-echoed against those desolate and broken walls.

A day or two ago I happened on a description of this town, written by a man who had seen it at the time I was there.

“The main street,” he writes, “is like a great museum of prehistoric fauna.  The house roofs, denuded of tiles and the joists left naked, have tilted forward on to the sidewalks, so that they hang in mid-air like giant vertebrae....  One house only of the whole village of ——­ had been spared.”

We stumbled down the street toward the trenches and at last stopped before a house.  Through boards nailed across what had once been windows a few rays of light escaped.  There was no roof; a side wall and an entire corner were gone.  It was the residence of the ladies of the decoration.

Inside there was for a moment an illusion of entirety.  The narrow corridor that ran through the centre of the house was weatherproof.  But through some unseen gap rushed the wind of the night.  At the right, warm with lamplight, was the reception room, dining room and bedroom—­one small chamber about twelve by fifteen!

What a strange room it was, furnished with odds and ends from the shattered houses about!  A bed in the corner; a mattress on the floor; a piano in front of the shell-holed windows, a piano so badly cracked by shrapnel that panels of the woodwork were missing and keys gone; two or three odd chairs and what had once been a bookcase, and in the centre a pine table laid for a meal.

Mrs. K——­, whose uncle was a cabinet minister, was hurrying in with a frying-pan in her hand.

“The mutton!” she said triumphantly, and placed it on the table, frying-pan and all.  The other lady of the decoration followed with the potatoes, also in the pan in which they had been cooked.