moment for the War Office.  I hunted up the man who had charge of these Labour visits, and made friends with him.  Gresson, he said, had been a quiet, well-mannered, and most appreciative guest.  He had wept tears on Vimy Ridge, and—­strictly against orders—­had made a speech to some troops he met on the Arras road about how British Labour was remembering the Army in its prayers and sweating blood to make guns.  On the last day he had had a misadventure, for he got very sick on the road—­some kidney trouble that couldn’t stand the jolting of the car—­and had to be left at a village and picked up by the party on its way back.  They found him better, but still shaky.  I cross-examined the particular officer in charge about that halt, and learned that Gresson had been left alone in a peasant’s cottage, for he said he only needed to lie down.  The place was the hamlet of Eaucourt Sainte-Anne.

For several weeks that name stuck in my head.  It had a pleasant, quaint sound, and I wondered how Gresson had spent his hours there.  I hunted it up on the map, and promised myself to have a look at it the next time we came out to rest.  And then I forgot about it till I heard the name mentioned again.

On 23rd October I had the bad luck, during a tour of my first-line trenches, to stop a small shell-fragment with my head.  It was a close, misty day and I had taken off my tin hat to wipe my brow when the thing happened.  I got a long, shallow scalp wound which meant nothing but bled a lot, and, as we were not in for any big move, the M.O. sent me back to a clearing station to have it seen to.  I was three days in the place and, being perfectly well, had leisure to look about me and reflect, so that I recall that time as a queer, restful interlude in the infernal racket of war.  I remember yet how on my last night there a gale made the lamps swing and flicker, and turned the grey-green canvas walls into a mass of mottled shadows.  The floor canvas was muddy from the tramping of many feet bringing in the constant dribble of casualties from the line.  In my tent there was no one very bad at the time, except a boy with his shoulder half-blown off by a whizz-bang, who lay in a drugged sleep at the far end.  The majority were influenza, bronchitis, and trench-fever—­waiting to be moved to the base, or convalescent and about to return to their units.

A small group of us dined off tinned chicken, stewed fruit, and radon cheese round the smoky stove, where two screens manufactured from packing cases gave some protection against the draughts which swept like young tornadoes down the tent.  One man had been reading a book called the Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, and the talk turned on the unexplainable things that happen to everybody once or twice in a lifetime.  I contributed a yarn about the men who went to look for Kruger’s treasure in the bushveld and got scared by a green wildebeeste.  It is a good yarn and I’ll write it down some day.  A tall