horse to shoe." Then back again to the farm, where, as one fresh from the outer world, I am subjected to a vigorous cross-examination on all I have seen and done. Again, perhaps in the middle of a long spell of ploughing, we would sit down to tea, and Dan would suddenly say, "There's ten ton o' coals at the station for us! You'll have to go for it with t' rulley and two carts in t' mornin'." Then we begin to get a move on. It simply is not done at our farm, to drive into the town without shining harness and brasses-hames like silver, and boots and leggings clean. That means that after tea we go out into the stable again and start cleaning and polishing, and fastening brass facepieces on to our "blinders," and martingales, covered with brasses and bells, on to the collars. I wonder how many people realise that the brasses they see shining on the heads and chests of the horses in a farm waggon or town dray are not the property of the owner of the horses, but of the man who drives them? and to a great extent you can judge a "waggoner's" pride in his horses by the number and condition of his brasses. Boots and I used to like to go into the town as resplendent as possible, and we gradually collected a magnificent set of brasses for our horses. In fact, Boots had a martingale which was the admiration of the town, and many a time have I been asked for a facepiece like my little Sam's. He used to look splendid with his black coat shining—a martingale with four brasses down his chest, a regimental coat-ofarms on his forehead, on top of his head a little horse "rampant" swinging in brass ring-his tail tied up with ribbons, brown and orange and and green, and a knotted halter swinging jauntily to his knee. Jook had another set of brasses for himself, and Boots again for her horses. On all these special occasions, such as fetching coal or coke from the station, or delivering corn after threshing, it would be a very unusual circumstance which 88W us without them. Though I must admit that once, on a very wet muddy day, Sam eluded me at the stable door and skipped off into a plough field, and rolled, and rolled, and rolled. I need not describe the result, and Sam would be furious if he knew I'd told, because he was rather ashamed afterwards. Generally the railwaymen used to come and say, "Your horses do look well! but that day they didn't, and I think Sam felt he was a little to blame about it. (To be concluded.) CINEMA OF WAR. EVERY platform of the railway station at Amiens was orowded with a noisy throng of soldiers and civilians. British and Colonial soldiers, waiting for the leave-train, composed about a third of the great concourse, and the rest consisted of repatriated French people on their way north in batches to reinhabit, now that victory had been won, the less devastated districts. The civilians looked tired and pinched, but they were happy. Were they not proceeding to their homes? Had they not been assured that those homes (fortunate in comparison with the homes of so many others) still stood? Yes, they were going back to their own beloved patch of France, and that was enough for them. A French officer to whom I had once expressed astonishment at the way in which the peasantry clung to their villages under constant shell fire, had answered very simply, "Ils aiment beaucoup la terre." Amiens itself has not suffered much visible damage from bombardment, and the Cathedral is practically unharmed. But the quarter down by the railway station has been a good deal knooked about, and the station roof has not one pane of glass remaining. Shell scars and heaps of débris are everywhere. You think as you look around you what a narrow escape the great city and traffic- centre had, what a touch-and-go affair it all was before the breakthrough, which took place in the fog last March, was finally held up. The last time I had been in that station-passing through from Paris en route from Salonika to Boulogne-was on the 21st of that portentous month. In Paris that morning the first "Big Bertha” shell had fallen (to the confusion mainly of the experts); and I remember how an officer got into our fog-groping train at a station outside Amiens, and told us that the heaviest Hun bombardment of the war had started before daybreak all along the line. Here now was I, in early December, back in that same Amiens station, and the world was at peace our peace. Since that March day, what a lot of things had happened! In the mighty thrust and resistance which had followed, the battle front had been pinned almost within storming distance of the city, and the line from Amiens to Paris had had to be closed. When, in the middle of last July, I passed from Arras, where all were standing waiting for a fresh enemy blow, to Champagne, where a mighty blow had just been mightily met, I had to travel to Paris vid Abbeville and Beauvais. Then I had seen the transition of the French from the defensive to the offensive (al most, one might say, from graveyard-the prayers, the grave to gay). I had seen fears, the resolutions, the bethe help given to them by reavements. The road over some of our best Divisions. I which we now went so smoothly had seen the Rheims and had been repaired, but the Soissons sectors begin to press "country" on either side was forward upon the surprised still bereft of all semblance of and bewildered Boche-French, life, churned into a thing abomBritish, Italians, with the inable. All that had been light of victory in their eyes. added to it since the fighting The wonderful good fortune were many thousands of little was then mine of being trans- wooden crosses, and the dead ferred once more to the Arras had been tenderly bestowed front (but still keeping clear beneath their care. Names, of the Amiens railway station) too, had been painted on boards just as the British offensive, all along the road, on the sites which was to win the war, of little villages which, though was about to open. they have disappeared in fact, are mighty now in memoryWarlencourt, Courcelette, Martinpuich, Thiepval, Pozières, Contalmaison. On the grim "Slag Heap" three orosses stand against the sky, as on the Mount of Olives of a nightmare. It is all very splendid, and not a little tremulous, to look back upon now; but what periods there were in that long four years' struggle before we had triumphed, when it really had seemed as if the Beast might after all have his way! Or, perhaps, if one never quite felt that, the thought may have come that personally one could never expect to see our triumph. But now the Armistice was a fact, had been so for a month, and I was waiting upon the Amiens platform to go on leave to Paris. I had just motored down through the devastated area, back once more across the Hindenburg Line and the Drocourt-Queant Switch, through which we had so irresistibly broken. Every stage in that journey, done so swiftly and so easily now, had been gained at no one will ever know what cost, or by what dauntless heroism. One picked up all ones unvoiced thoughts while passing back over that dismal The train for Paris was very late, and a couple of local trains, although they had proceeded on their way crammed with repatriés whom they had picked up at the station, had not produced any visible diminution in the numbers which thronged the platforms. Then, while we continued to wait, an empty goods train came backing in rather aimlessly and halted opposite to where I stood. The waggon immediately in front of me was a covered truck, fall of German pris or abuse such as would have As one who has been through been lavishly forthcoming had it all put it to me when the the positions been reversed. Armistice had been announced, Indeed there was scarcely any "The sense of the immense notice at all taken of the mourning of the world comes caged specimens, who on their to one amid these solitudes, part merely continued to re- and is overwhelming. I never gard the crowd with a dull thought that when Peace came and unabashed complacency. I should feel like this." The British and Colonial soldiers had no remarks to offer. One big New Zealander, seated on a barrow, continued amid the hubhub to study a pocket edition of 'The Merchant of Venice.' That was the end of the "haoking through," the ruthlessness, and the victory that was to come to Germany before the leaves had fallen from the trees for the second winter! When the Paris-bound train had at last arrived and I had secured a seat in a carriage full of French officers and civilians (how strange to be travelling with French civilians again !), I leant back and let my thoughts wander over some of the events of the last four years. While the war lasted this was a thing one did not indulge in overmuch Thinking and writing-and indeed speaking-about those happenings, while still the war pursued its course, had been almost impossible. But even now that it is all over, the immense relief and the joy that all along one counted upon feeling, have not come in the measure or the manner of one's expectation. Relief and joy, and humble thankfulness to God, of course, are there; but in a different way and in a different degree. As the dear French country sped by, changing gradually from the scarred and wirelittered, once grandiose, country of the Somme basin, to the calm of the district which had sheltered inviolate behind the Allied armies, and as daylight faded from the scene, with what chastened joy one's thoughts sped back! A string of empty waggons and a returning battery were coming down a slope, with the last light catching them ere they' were engulfed in the valley. A derelict motor-lorry lay in a rusted heap on the side of the road. Then the lights were turned up in our carriage, and the countryside passed from the view. Opposite me a French colonel with a long row of medals nodded off to sleep, propped between a curé and a British subaltern. I thought for one fleeting instant of the same journey in the old prewar days, when Abbeville and Amiens were to the English tourist little more than haltingplaces on the swift journey to Paris. "Amiens; dix minutes d'arret!" the old ory came stealing to me out of the past, Many, I am sure, in that carriage were busy with their thoughts. What fascinating volumes would they make could we but write them down! Trench warfare at Armentierès, with kindly recollections of the farm people on whom, when we came out to rest, we were billeted; memories, too, of that lovely country and its fine-sounding names, and of a gem of an ancient church at Erquinghem-sur-la-Lys. In what condition is it all now? Mine took me (though in hap- in the drowsy fields of Locre, hazard fashion) back to that where we got our mail from first week in October 1914, home. when we of the Seventh Division landed on the Belgian coast at Zeebrugge. They took me to Ostend, and Ghent, and Bruges of those breathless days, to Thielt and Roulers, and through the epic of First Ypres. I 88 W again the slaughter of that fighting, and recalled the humiliation of the discovery that War was 80 much more overwhelming than we had ever been led to expect. Men dying like flies, but outclassed only in numbers. the care and thoroughness and splendid training brought to nought by the elementary lack of numbers. Well, not perhaps to nought, for though dying they won; but dimly and inooherently they knew that for some reason they had never had a chance. All Then what recollections came trooping through the mindall the incidents of First Ypres, the first French regiments I ever saw in action, and a German barrage across the Menin road near Veldhoek, which was near to being the end of it all for me. A spell in a London hospital and at home, and then the getting back to all that beastliness-to Second Ypres, with its added horrors of gas, and to another narrowly averted break-through. Afterwards, a risky relief by night in Sanctuary Wood, and a march at dawn past the ruins of Ypres, at which I, who had seen the Cloth Hall in its beauty, could not look; a long halt, on a wonderful May day, More trench warfare on the since devastated Somme, then (in the autum of 1915) unspoilt this side of Dompierre and Frise. They were hideous trenches that here we took over from the French, mined and tunnelled; and if you struck a match on entering your subterranean dug-out, the rats passed slowly up the walls behind the brushwood revetments, unable to go quicker because of their being so many. And then, suddenly, a change of scene and warfare complete and absolute, involving a two and a half years' absence from France. Thoughts pass through the mind of Marseilles-familiar point of embarkation and disembarkation during the days of one's Indian soldiering-and of a couple of blue-and-gold November days between there and Carcassone, in a camp amid the pines, looking down upon the Gulf of Lions. Cheery friends forgathered at Basso's and were duly disappointed with bouillabaisse, but compensated by the discovery of a Barsac which they christened "Liquid Sunshine." Expeditions were made to the Chateau d'If and to Notre |