We were running north of St just when above the rattle of the train rose a curious dull sound.  It came from the east, and was like the low growl of a veld thunderstorm, or a steady roll of muffled drums.

‘Hark to the guns!’ cried Archie.  ’My aunt, there’s a tidy bombardment goin’ on somewhere.’

I had been listening on and off to guns for three years.  I had been present at the big preparations before Loos and the Somme and Arras, and I had come to accept the racket of artillery as something natural and inevitable like rain or sunshine.  But this sound chilled me with its eeriness, I don’t know why.  Perhaps it was its unexpectedness, for I was sure that the guns had not been heard in this area since before the Marne.  The noise must be travelling down the Oise valley, and I judged there was big fighting somewhere about Chauny or La Fere.  That meant that the enemy was pressing hard on a huge front, for here was clearly a great effort on his extreme left wing.  Unless it was our counter-attack.  But somehow I didn’t think so.

I let down the window and stuck my head into the night.  The fog had crept to the edge of the track, a gossamer mist through which houses and trees and cattle could be seen dim in the moonlight.  The noise continued—­not a mutter, but a steady rumbling flow as solid as the blare of a trumpet.  Presently, as we drew nearer Amiens, we left it behind us, for in all the Somme valley there is some curious configuration which blankets sound.  The countryfolk call it the ‘Silent Land’, and during the first phase of the Somme battle a man in Amiens could not hear the guns twenty miles off at Albert.

As I sat down again I found that the company had fallen silent, even the garrulous Archie.  Mary’s eyes met mine, and in the indifferent light of the French railway-carriage I could see excitement in them—­I knew it was excitement, not fear.  She had never heard the noise of a great barrage before.  Blenkiron was restless, and Peter was sunk in his own thoughts.  I was growing very depressed, for in a little I would have to part from my best friends and the girl I loved.  But with the depression was mixed an odd expectation, which was almost pleasant.  The guns had brought back my profession to me, I was moving towards their thunder, and God only knew the end of it.  The happy dream I had dreamed of the Cotswolds and a home with Mary beside me seemed suddenly to have fallen away to an infinite distance.  I felt once again that I was on the razor-edge of life.

The last part of the journey I was casting back to rake up my knowledge of the countryside.  I saw again the stricken belt from Serre to Combles where we had fought in the summer of ’17.  I had not been present in the advance of the following spring, but I had been at Cambrai and I knew all the down country from Lagnicourt to St Quentin.  I shut my eyes and tried to picture it, and to see the roads running up to the line, and wondered just at what