PAGES OF WAR.
ABLACK square of star-pricked night makes the fourth wall of the squadron mess, where bottle-sconced candles gutter in the pungent wood-smoke that drifts from the blaze outside. Hunched on packing-cases—it is early in the cam- paign, and a measure of avoidable discomfort is still the fashion—the officers chat of polo, hunting, big-game, pig- sticking, round the crumb-strewn cloth. Names flash to and fro in argument, living and newly dead ; it is a cavalcade of sportsmen, the flower of the counties, that makes a shifting tapestry, conjured by tense phrase or anecdote, for the peeling walls of the dilapidated barn. Pink-coated and white- breeched, they hover for a moment in the full-blooded glory of the far-off life that was the half-realized school and prelude of to-day's cup.and-ball existence—shiver and pass as the next insistent wraith usurps their place. Now and then it is some slim woman's shape that takes the stage, black-habited and trimly perfect, smiling a welcome from the covert-aide, and then away before she has lingered enough to be an intruder in this tanned and salted company of men. Tending the streaming fire, the mess servants whisper their own gossip of barrack tales.
"Do you know how So-and-so in your regiment is getting on?" a willowy Captain, the true cavalryman of fiction, with his smooth fair hair and exquisitely booted leg, casually asks the deep-chested young Highland giant who has strayed in to find a guide for his battalion across the unlit uplands—the very picture of a fighting man, with knees showing brown and knotted above the red and white of his diced hose- tops. "Killed in action a couple of days ago," the answer comes square and unquestionable as the blow of a Nasmyth hammer. "Are you sure?" "Absolutely—he was my company com- mander." There is a second's tight-keyed silence, then a pen- men rush of trivial conversation pumped out by all the hosts at once, while the inquirer slips softly into the darkness. Troubled and half-greasing, "I say, I hope he isn't—," the Highlander gropes in humbled confusion.
" You couldn't possibly know," the squadron leader soothes him with fatalistic regret. "It was his brother . ."
• • " Vos homrnes m'ont pris des perches—v'nez voir . . et pi', y m'ont encore pris—," the whining voice drones on in unworthy contrast to the tall build and scarcely bowed shoulders of this mahogany-hard farmer, who has spent the best part of his sixty-five years locked in mortal grips with the reluctant earth, fighting her inch by inch and yard by yard in a struggle that will end only with his own life. With finely adjusted cunning, sharpened every year to a keener edge, he knows just how much to give her, the sheer minimum of tight-fisted concession, in order that he may take and take and take. Small wonder if he is the richest tenant of this laboured countryside where every clod of soil must yield the extreme essence of its sweated fertility for a wage of beggarly manure dosed out with the anxious precision of a laudanum dropper. True, there was an interlude, long ago, when he was serving as a conscript in the war of '70—and even now, so far as carriage goes, the veteran in him almost holds his own against the peasant who quickly removes and replaces his skimpy hat with cring- ing calculation as he crosses the threshold of his own living- room, where H. Is Commandant-anglais sits writing. But his time of service wrought on him no more than a lasting outward impress: if ever he seemed a dashing. casual answer, his heart all the time was coaxing, forcing, bullying the lean, inaccessible land. Now war has come his way again, but to-day it must be turned to profit. Five sons—five stout labourers: he has seen to that—have been called away; they have left him only a misshapen, half-witted dunce, whom he scarcely acknowledges as his own—but profit there must be. Polities, nation, country—words ! And words cannot help to mint the stubborn furrows. No; but fortunately with these English even words can be made to serve their turn.
"Des perches que j'ai payees cinq sous piece —v'nez voir."
After the turmoil and clatter of an early false alarm., worked up in a frantic crescendo of musketry and shells by perhaps half-a-dozen snipers, the night, stagily green under a veiled moon, is one vast hymn of silence, scored to the 'cello accompaniment of muffled underground snores. Propping himself against the dewy parapet, chin on elbow, the sentry stares ahead with smarting, sleep-sanded eyes, conecientiously straining to pierce the liquid screen of fog in which the beet- root-tops melt at ten yards distance into insidious shapes and weird potentialities. Even the friendly cottage, midway between the opposing trenches, spared so far in the universal wreckage of the surrounding farms, where, at tacitly respected intervals, the men unconcernedly walk out to boil the water for their tea, has disappeared as though it had never been— burnt down by the enemy, some imaginative trooper has surmised. Still—exquisitely, superhumanly still—it is, and from a little distance you might take the gruntings of the straw-enfolded sleepers for the mighty, gentle breaking of earth itself.
What's that ? The watching figure stiffens and bristles as under an electric shock. A minute—a lifetime—of fiercely concentrated staring. Swiftly lie stoops and shakes the sleeping sergeant. Head to head, they peer and whisper. giruleting by sheer force of will the misty curtain that begins to thin. Now the young sergeant, catlike and keen. slips from the trench, a velvet shadow, to rouse the squadron leader, while the sentry kicks his section upright with a hissed "Stand to your arms!" and frosty bayonets click crisply on the studs. Already in wireless sympathy bends bob up behind every loophole. In a second the squadron leader is on Iris feet. "Where d'you say " " Straight to your front, Sir," comes the panting answer, "two hundred yards— company of the enemy advancing in close formation . very sorry, Sir, beg your pardon—it's a house!"
With its darkened lights and sparse traffic, its khaki-dotted clubs and restaurants working at half-pressure, its trans- formed shop-windows, where everything is "for the front," London was yet never so absolutely, so intimately itself. All the distilled essence of the Empire is concentrated here under these foggy skies swept by wheeling searchlights. As though in the full pageant of mid-season, the cream of the shires and bigwigs from the unfamiliar counties pass and repass along pavements where no alien jostles them off the kerb, magnetized every one of them from their homes by haunting, mute anxiety to keep their finger on the pulse of the world's supreme news-centre. There has even sprung up a sort of silent freemasonry among these pilgrims indecently and irresist- ibly wrenched from their normal land-owning existence. The dainty blue serge that hurries, clasping a huge bunch of Parma violets, towards the iodized atmosphere of Welheck Street, has almost a smile—a flash of tears and courage—for the mother who returns empty and heavy-hearted yet humbled to thank God for her uncertainty from the War Office. Charming fashionables gliding to foolish committees glimmer appreciation from deep-seated, shadowy limousines to young men obviously home on leave. Even the majesty of St. James's has abated its serene hostility to an almost perceptible welcome for the stranger who is, after all, of its own blood. Revelling in the brief freedom of kis civilian clothes and proudly secure in the consciousness of accumulated pay, the Subaltern just home from the front, and on his way to entertain a little party at the Savoy, boldly faces the velvet hush of the Dover Street dressmaker's, and without flinching signs a cheque for the prodigious sum which the half-interested saleswoman quotes. An exquisite, frivolous thing, this theatre wrap of subduedly glittering scales which he has bought for the lady of his choice. Reassure yourself she is his mother, ever young and ever lovely, one of those supreme women who smile smooth- eheeked and confident, with something like death in their hearts, at the receding boat.train—the Mother of the Gmcchi, dressed by Poiret.
• • • • On the sodden, tussocky field, whipped by gales of sleet, the khaki teams are struggling for the ball, chasing, chargiug, twisting, clearing with all the intent eagerness of a first-class semi-final. A quaint sight now, these officers, initiates of peace- time perfection in every detail of their innumerable kits. You would take them for scarecrows from the rag-bag, with their breeches ripped off at the knee for shorts, their putteed calves, and here and there a poacher's cap or Balaclava helmet that brings into the mixture a queer flavour of aviation or American football. Who is that rare master of the elegances, just back from leave, no doubt, who is flaunting from neck to knee in conventional white, a swan among the geese? And the sergeants! But for their shaven chins you would say they had walked on to the ground straight from the trenches, earth-coloured and earth-stained. Men of Britain, straining every energy in play with a single-hearted concentration of purpose more pregnant to the discerner than all the flashing eyes and gritted teeth that ever toasted "The Day "— stumbling, sliding, rolling in retentive mud, with, for back. ground, the mounded outline of alien roofs and spires, lapped in the stagnant trance of foreign country towns.
What matter though the wind stings and lashes and the tiny hoot of watching comrades has long since dwindled to a couple of water-logged linesmen? What matter if overhead the seagull grey shadow of a biplane is doggedly beating up the sky? The gusty boom of guns troubles them not at all: they have no eyes for the sparse flashes that dot the distant clouds—no thoughts for the string of Red Cross waggons gliding like a swiftly told rosary along the interminable road that bars the sky-line with its border of tall trees, whose resolute monotony
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