``The youngest of them was only just eighteen.  That was Dick.  They told him to get out and put his hands up and be quick getting across, as soon as they had told him one or two things about the old time in Daleswood that a youngster like him wouldn’t know.

``Well, Dick said he wasn’t going, and was making trouble about it, so they told Fred to go.  Back, they told him, was best, and come up behind the Boche with his hands up; they would be less likely to shoot when it was back towards their own supports.

``Fred wouldn’t go, and so on with the rest.  Well, they didn’t waste time quarrelling, time being scarce, and they said what was to be done?  There was chalk where they were, low down in the trench, a little brown clay on the top of it.  There was a great block of it loose near a shelter.  They said they would carve with their knives on the big bowlder of chalk all that they knew about Daleswood.  They would write where it was and just what it was like, and they would write something of all those little things that pass with a generation.  They reckoned on having the time for it.  It would take a direct hit with something large, what they call big stuff, to do any harm to that bowlder.  They had no confidence in paper, it got so messed up when you were hit; besides, the Boche had been using thermite.  Burns, that does.

``They’d one or two men that were handy at carving chalk; used to do the regimental crest and pictures of Hindenburg, and all that.  They decided they’d do it in reliefs.

``They started smoothing the chalk.  They had nothing more to do but just to think what to write.  It was a great big bowlder with plenty of room on it.  The Boche seemed not to know that they hadn’t killed the Daleswood men, just as the sea mightn’t know that one stone stayed dry at the coming in of the tide.  A gap between two divisions probably.

``Harry wanted to tell of the woods more than anything.  He was afraid they might cut them down because of the war, and no one would know of the larks they had had there as boys.  Wonderful old woods they were, with a lot of Spanish chestnut growing low, and tall old oaks over it.  Harry wanted them to write down what the foxgloves were like in the wood at the end of summer, standing there in the evening, `Great solemn rows,’ he said, `all odd in the dusk.  All odd in the evening, going there after work; and makes you think of fairies.’  There was lots of things about those woods, he said, that ought to be put down if people were to remember Daleswood as it used to be when they knew it.  What were the good old days without those woods? he said.

``But another wanted to tell of the time when they cut the hay with scythes, working all those long days at the end of June; there would be no more of that, he said, with machines come in and all.

``There was room to tell of all that and the woods too, said the others, so long as they put it short like.