It would stir anybody, Claude reflected.  There was her lonely little grave, the shadow of the privet hedge falling across it.  There, at the foot of the Cure’s garden, was the German cemetery, with heavy cement crosses,—­some of them with long inscriptions; lines from their poets, and couplets from old hymns.  Lieutenant Muller was there somewhere, probably.  Strange, how their story stood out in a world of suffering.  That was a kind of misery he hadn’t happened to think of before; but the same thing must have occurred again and again in the occupied territory.  He would never forget the Cure’s hands, his dim, suffering eyes.

Claude recognized David crossing the pavement in front of the church, and went back to meet him.

“Hello!  I mistook you for Hicks at first.  I thought he might be out here.”  David sat down on the steps and lit a cigarette.

“So did I. I came out to look for him.”

“Oh, I expect he’s found some shoulder to cry on.  Do you realize, Claude, you and I are the only men in the Company who haven’t got engaged?  Some of the married men have got engaged twice.  It’s a good thing we’re pulling out, or we’d have banns and a bunch of christenings to look after.”  “All the same,” murmured Claude, “I like the women of this country, as far as I’ve seen them.”  While they sat smoking in silence, his mind went back to the quiet scene he had watched on the steps of that other church, on his first night in France; the country girl in the moonlight, bending over her sick soldier.

When they walked back across the square, over the crackling leaves, the dance was breaking up.  Oscar was playing “Home, Sweet Home,” for the last waltz.

“Le dernier baiser,” said David.  “Well, tomorrow we’ll be gone, and the chances are we won’t come back this way.”

XVIII

“With us it’s always a feast or a famine,” the men groaned, when they sat down by the road to munch dry biscuit at noon.  They had covered eighteen miles that morning, and had still seven more to go.  They were ordered to do the twenty-five miles in eight hours.  Nobody had fallen out yet, but some of the boys looked pretty well wilted.  Nifty Jones said he was done for.  Sergeant Hicks was expostulating with the faint-hearted.  He knew that if one man fell out, a dozen would.

“If I can do it, you can.  It’s worse on a fat man like me.  This is no march to make a fuss about.  Why, at Arras I talked with a little Tommy from one of those Pal Battalions that got slaughtered on the Somme.  His battalion marched twenty-five miles in six hours, in the heat of July, into certain death.  They were all kids out of school, not a man of them over five-foot-three, called them the ‘Bantams.’  You’ve got to hand it to them, fellows.”

“I’ll hand anything to anybody, but I can’t go no farther on these,” Jones muttered, nursing his sore feet.