* * * * *

Three weeks later I was sitting at dejeuner in the Metropole, when a ragamuffin came in with the London papers, which had just arrived by the leave-boat.  I took up the Times and looked, as one always looks nowadays, at the obituary column.  I looked again.  In the same column, one succeeding the other, I read the following: 

     Killed in action on 8th inst., near Givenchy, Arthur Hamilton C——­
     of the ——­ Guards, 3rd Battalion, only child of the late Arthur C.
     and of Mrs. C. of the Red House, Little Twickenham, aged 19.

     Behold!  I take away the desire of thine eyes with a stroke.

     Killed in action on the 8th inst., while dressing a wounded soldier
     under fire, Major Ronald B——­, D.S.O., of the Royal Army Medical
     Corps, aged 42.

     Greater love hath no man than this.

II

THE FRONT

VII

THE TWO RICHEBOURGS

We had business with the maire of the commune of Richebourg St. Vaast.  Any one who looks at a staff map of North-West France will see that there are two Richebourgs; there is Richebourg St. Vaast, but there is also Richebourg l’Avoue, and although those two communes are separated by a bare three or four kilometres there was in point of climate a considerable difference between the two.  In those days we had not yet taken Neuve Chapelle, and Richebourg l’Avoue, which was in front of our lines, was considered “unhealthy.”  Richebourg St. Vaast, on the other hand, was well behind our lines and was considered by our billeting officers quite a good residential neighbourhood.

We had left G.H.Q., and after a journey of two hours or so passed through Laventie, which had been rather badly mauled by shell-fire, and began to thread our way through the skein of roads and by-roads that enmeshes the two Richebourgs.  The natural features of the country were inscrutable, and landmarks there were none.  The countryside grew absolutely deserted and the solitary farms were roofless and untenanted.  Eventually we found our road blocked by a barricade of fallen masonry in front of a village which was as inhospitable as the Cities of the Plain.

A vast silence brooded over the landscape, broken now and again by a noise like the crackling of thorns under a pot.  As we took cover behind a wall of ruined houses we heard a sinister hiss, but whence it came or what invisible trajectory it traced through the leaden skies overhead neither of us could tell.  Silence again fell like a mist upon the land; not a bird sang, not a twig moved.  The winter sun was sinking in the west behind a pall of purple cloud in a lacquered sky—­the one touch of colour in the sombre greyness.  The land was flat as the palm of one’s hand, its monotony relieved only