“You’ve lost your connecting files, me lad,” he exclaimed reproachfully; “you ain’t out on patrol, yer know.  ’Shun!  Now again!  ’Christians’.”

     Christians, awake!  Salute the happy morn,
     Whereon ...

The familiar melody was shut behind me as I closed the door.  Those West-country voices awoke in me haunting memories of my childhood, and, in a flash, I saw once again a ring of ruddy faces on a frosty night, illuminated by the candle in a shepherd’s horn lantern, their breath a luminous vapour in the still air, and my mother holding me up at the window of our Wiltshire house, as I looked out from the casement of the nursery upon the up-turned faces of the choristers below and wondered mazily whether they had brought Father Christmas with them.

A low cry of pain reached my ears as I opened the door of Surgical Ward A.I.  A nurse was removing a field-dressing from a soldier just brought down from the Front.  The surgeon stood over him ready to spray the wound with peroxide.  “Buck up, old chap,” cried the patients in the neighbouring beds who looked on encouragingly at these ministries.  Another moan escaped him as the discoloured bandage, with its faint odour of perchloride, was stripped from the raw and inflamed flesh.

“Next gramophone record, please!” chanted his neighbours.  The patient smiled faintly at the exhortation and set his teeth.

“That’s better, sonny,” whispered the nurse with benign approval.

“It won’t hurt you, old chap, I’m only going to drain off the septic matter,” interjected the surgeon in holland overalls, with sleeves tucked up to the elbow.  “Here, give me that tube.”  The dresser handed him a nickel reed from the sterilising basin.

With a few light quick movements the wound was sprayed, dressed, cleansed, and anointed, and the surgeon, like the good Samaritan, passed on to the next case.  Only last night the patient was in the trenches, moaning with pain, as the stretcher-bearers carried him to the aid-post, and from the aid-post to the forward dressing station, whence by an uneasy journey (there were no sumptuous hospital-trains in those days) he had come hither.  But what of the others who were hit outside the trenches and who lay even now, this Christmas Eve, in that dreadful No Man’s Land swept by the enemy’s fire, whither no stretcher-bearer can go—­lying among the dead and dying, a field of creeping forms, some quivering in the barbed wire, where dead men hang as on a gibbet, hoping only for a cleanly death from a bullet before their wounds fester and poison the blood in their veins.

     Whereon—­the Saviour—­of mankind—­was—­born.

The measured cadence fell on my ear as I left the ward and passed beyond the annexe.  The sergeant had now got his section well in hand.  I turned up the long winding road towards my quarters.  It was a cold moonlight night, and every twig of broom and beech was sharply defined as in a black-and-white drawing.  Overhead each star was hard and bright, as though a lapidary had been at work in the heavens, and never had the Great Bear seemed so brilliant.  But none so bright and legible—­or so it seemed to me—­as Mars in all that starry heraldry.