Spring is coming late, and with a marvel of green.  A wind blows in from the sea, and the lilacs nod from over the hedge.  The tender corn rustles its soft little chimes, and all across it the wind sends arpeggio chords of delicate music, like a harp played on silver strings.  A great big horse-chestnut tree, carrying its flowers proudly like a bouquet, showers the road with petals, and the shy hedges put up a screen all laced and decorated with white may.  It just seems as if Mother Earth had become young again, and was tossing her babies up to the summer sky, and the wind played hide-and-seek, or peep-bo, or some other ridiculous game, with them, and made the summer babies as glad and as mischievous as himself.  Only the guns boom all the time, and my poor little French Marines, who drink far too much, and have the manners of princes, come in on ambulances in the evening, or at the “poste” a hole is dug for them in the ground, and they are laid down gently in their dirty coats.

Mother Earth, with her new-born babies, stops laughing for a moment, and says to me, “It’s all right, my dear; they have to come back to me, as all my children and all their works must do.  Why make any complaint?  For a time they are happy, playing and building their little castles, and making their little books, and weaving stories and wreaths of flowers; but the stories, the castles, the flowers I gave them, and they themselves, all come back to me at last—­the leaves next autumn, and the boy you love perhaps to-morrow.”

Oh, Father God, Mother Earth, as it was in the beginning will it be in the end?  Will you give us and them a good time again, and will the spring burst into singing in some other country?  I don’t know.  I don’t know.

Only I do know this—­I am sure of it now for the first time, and it is worth while spending a long, long winter within the sound of guns in order to know it—­that death brings release, not release from mere suffering or pain, but in some strange and unknown way it brings freedom.  Soldiers realise it:  they have been more terrified than their own mothers will ever know, and their very spines have melted under the shrieking sound of shells, and then comes the day when they “don’t mind.”  Death stalks just as near as ever, but his face is suddenly quite kind.  A stray bullet or a piece of shell may come, but what does it matter?  This is the day when the soldier learns to stroll when the shrapnel is falling, and to look up and laugh when the murderous bullet pings close by.

[Page Heading:  SOUVENIRS]

War souvenirs!  There are heaps of them, and I hate them all; pieces of jagged shell, helmets with bullets through them, pieces of burnt aeroplanes, scraps of clothing rent by a bayonet.  Yesterday, at the station, I saw a sick Zouave nursing a German summer casquette.  He said quietly, being very sick:  “The burgomaster chez moi wanted one.  Yes, I had to kill a German officer for it—­ce n’est rien de quoi—­I got a ball in my leg too, mais mon burgomaster sera tres content d’avoir une casquette d’un boche.”  Our own men leave their trenches and go out into the open to get these horrible things, with their battered exterior and the suggestion of pomade inside.