Then suddenly the cloud lifted from me, and the blood seemed to run naturally in my veins.  I experienced the change of mood which a man feels sometimes when his whole being is fined down and clarified by long endurance.  The fight of yesterday revealed itself as something rather splendid.  What risks we had run and how gallantly we had met them!  My heart warmed as I thought of that old division of mine, those ragged veterans that were never beaten as long as breath was left them.  And the Americans and the boys from the machine-gun school and all the oddments we had commandeered!  And old Blenkiron raging like a good-tempered lion!  It was against reason that such fortitude shouldn’t win out.  We had snarled round and bitten the Boche so badly that he wanted no more for a little.  He would come again, but presently we should be relieved and the gallant blue-coats, fresh as paint and burning for revenge, would be there to worry him.

I had no new facts on which to base my optimism, only a changed point of view.  And with it came a recollection of other things.  Wake’s death had left me numb before, but now the thought of it gave me a sharp pang.  He was the first of our little confederacy to go.  But what an ending he had made, and how happy he had been in that mad time when he had come down from his pedestal and become one of the crowd!  He had found himself at the last, and who could grudge him such happiness?  If the best were to be taken, he would be chosen first, for he was a big man, before whom I uncovered my head.  The thought of him made me very humble.  I had never had his troubles to face, but he had come clean through them, and reached a courage which was for ever beyond me.  He was the Faithful among us pilgrims, who had finished his journey before the rest.  Mary had foreseen it.  ‘There is a price to be paid,’ she had said—­’the best of us.’

And at the thought of Mary a flight of warm and happy hopes seemed to settle on my mind.  I was looking again beyond the war to that peace which she and I would some day inherit.  I had a vision of a green English landscape, with its far-flung scents of wood and meadow and garden . . .  And that face of all my dreams, with the eyes so childlike and brave and honest, as if they, too, saw beyond the dark to a radiant country.  A line of an old song, which had been a favourite of my father’s, sang itself in my ears: 

   There’s an eye that ever weeps and a fair face will be fain
   When I ride through Annan Water wi’ my bonny bands again!

We were standing by the crumbling rails of what had once been the farm sheepfold.  I looked at Archie and he smiled back at me, for he saw that my face had changed.  Then he turned his eyes to the billowing clouds.

I felt my arm clutched.

‘Look there!’ said a fierce voice, and his glasses were turned upward.

I looked, and far up in the sky saw a thing like a wedge of wild geese flying towards us from the enemy’s country.  I made out the small dots which composed it, and my glass told me they were planes.  But only Archie’s practised eye knew that they were enemy.