FOOTNOTES:

Empfangschein.Werth 500 fr. erhalten.Herr Hauptmann von Koepenick.

Empfangschein.

Werth 500 fr. erhalten.

Herr Hauptmann von Koepenick.

Then he smiled. He got up, put on his overcoat, took up his hat and cane, and went forth into the drizzling rain.

Two hours later he was at the headquarters of the Staff and asked to see the Commandant. He was shown into his presence without delay."Well?" said the Commandant. "Monsieur le Général, I have collected the fine," said themaire. The General's face relaxed its habitual sternness; he grew at once pleasant and polite. "Good," he said. Themaireopened a fat leather wallet and placed upon the table under the General's predatory nose a large pile of blue documents, some (but not all) stamped with the violet stamp of the German A.Q.M.G. "If thehochgeehrterGeneral will count them," said themaire, "he will see they come to 325,000 francs. It is rather more than the fine," he explained, "but I have made allowance for the fact that they are not immediately redeemable. They are mostly stamped, and—they are as good as gold."

For three minutes there was absolute silence in the room. The gilt clock in its glass sepulchre on the mantelpiece ticked off the seconds as loudly as a cricket on the hearth in the stillness of the night. Themairespeculated with more curiosity than fear as to how many more of these seconds he had to live. Never had the intervals seemed so long nor their registration so insistent. The ashes fell with a soft susurrus in the grate. The Commandant looked at themaire; themairelooked at the Commandant. Then the Commandant smiled. It was an inscrutable smile; a smile in which the eyes participated not at all.There was merely a muscular relaxation of the lips disclosing the teeth; to themairethere seemed something almost canine in it. At last the General spoke. "Gut!" he said gutturally; "you may go."

"You astonish me," I said to themaire, as he concluded his narrative. We were sitting in his parlour, smoking a cigar together one day in February in a town not a thousand miles from the German lines. "You know, Monsieur le Maire, they have shot many a municipal magistrate for less. I wonder they didn't make up their minds to shoot you." Themairesmiled. "They did," he said quietly. He carefully nicked the ash off his cigar, as he laid it down upon his desk, and opened the drawer of his escritoire. He took out a piece of paper and handed it to me. It was an order in German to shoot themaireon the evacuation of the town.

"You see, monsieur," he exclaimed, "your brave soldiers were a little too quick for them. You made a surprise attack in force early one morning and drove the enemy out. So surprising was it that the Staff officers billeted in my house left a box half full of cigars on my sideboard! You are smoking one of them now—a very good cigar, is it not?" It was. "And they left agood many official papers behind—what you call 'chits,' is it not?—and this one among them. Please mind your cigar-ash, monsieur! You see I rather value my own death-warrant."

Moved by an irresistible impulse I rose from my chair and held out my hand. Themairetook it in mild surprise. "Monsieur," I said frankly, if crudely, "you are a brave man. And you have endured much."

"Yes, monsieur," said themairegravely, as he glanced at a proclamation on the wall which he has added to his private collection of antiquities, "that is true. I have often beentrès fâchéto think that I who won the Michelet prize at the Lycée should have put my name to that thing over there."[26]

FOOTNOTES:[25]Deputy.[26]This narrative follows with some fidelity the course of events as related to the writer by themaireof the town in question. But for the most obvious of reasons the writer has deemed it his duty to suppress names, disguise events, and give the narrative something of the investiture of fiction. It is, however, true "in substance and in fact."—J. H. M.

[25]Deputy.

[26]This narrative follows with some fidelity the course of events as related to the writer by themaireof the town in question. But for the most obvious of reasons the writer has deemed it his duty to suppress names, disguise events, and give the narrative something of the investiture of fiction. It is, however, true "in substance and in fact."—J. H. M.

It was one of those perfect spring days when the whole earth seems to bare her bosom to the caresses of the sun. The sky was without a cloud and in the vault overhead, blue as a piece of Delft, a lark was ascending in transports of exultant song. The hill on which we stood was covered with young birch saplings bursting into leaf, and the sky itself was not more blue than the wild hyacinths at our feet. Here and there in the undergrowth gleamed the pallid anemone. A copper wire ran from pole to pole down the slope of the hill and glittered in the sun like a thread of gold. A little to our right two circular mirrors, glancing obliquely at each other, stood on a tripod, and a graduated sequence of flashes came and went, under the hands of the signallers, with the velocity of light itself. A few yards behind us on the crest of the hill stood a windmill, its great sails motionless as though it were a brig becalmed and waiting for a wind, andastride one arm, like a sailor on a yard, a carpenter was busy, with his mouth full of nails. The tapping of his hammer and the song of the lark were the only sounds that broke the warm stillness of the April day. A great plain stretched away at our feet, and in the fields below women were stooping forward over their hoes.

The white towers of Ypres gleamed ghostlike in the distant haze. The city had the wistful fragility of some beautiful mirage, and looking at it across the pleasant landscape I thought of the Pilgrim's vision of the Golden City shining in the sun beyond the Land of Beulah. Two or three miles away on our right the ground rose gently to a range of low wooded hills, and on their bare green slopes brown furrows showed up like a cicatrice. They were the German trenches. On the crest of the ridge a white house peeped out between the trees. That house seemed an object of peculiar interest to the battery-major at my side. He was stooping behind the "Director" with his eye to the sights as though he was focussing the distant object for a photograph. He fixed the outer clamp, unscrewed the inner clamp, and having got his sights on the house, he reversed the process and swung round the sights to bear on a little copse to our left. "One hundred and five," he said meditatively as he found the angle. The N.C.O. took up the range-finder andmeasured the distances first to the house, then to the copse. The major took up an adjustable triangle, and with a movement of thumb and forefinger converted it into the figure of an irregular "X." As he read off the battery angle on the "Plotter" the N.C.O. communicated it and the elevation to the telephone operator, who in turn communicated it to the battery in the copse. "Battery angle seventy. Range four thousand." Gunners are a laconic people, and their language is as economical of words as a proposition in Euclid; their sentences resemble those Oriental languages in which the verb is regarded as a superfluous impertinence. Language is to them a visual and symbolical thing in which angles and distances are predicated of churches, trees, and four-storied houses. Now in the copse on our left six field-guns were cunningly concealed, and even as the telephone operator spoke the dial-sights of those six guns were being screwed round and the elevating gear adjusted till they and the range-drum recorded the results of the major's meditations upon the hill. Then the guns in the copse spoke, and the air was sibilant with their speech. A little cloud no bigger than a man's hand arose above the roof of the white house on the ridge. Our battery had found its mark.

Somewhere behind that ridge were the enemy'sbatteries and they were yet to find. But even as we searched the landscape with our field-glasses an aeroplane rose from behind our own position and made for the distant ridge, its diaphanous wings displaying red, white, and blue concentric circles to our glasses like the scales of some huge magpie-moth, while a long streamer of petrol smoke made faint pencillings in the sky behind it. As it hovered above the ridge seven or eight little white clouds like balls of feathers suddenly appeared from nowhere just below it. They were German shrapnel. But the aeroplane passed imperturbably on, leaving the little feathers to float in the sky until in time they faded away and disappeared. In no long time the aeroplane was retracing its flight, and certain little coloured discs were speaking luminously to the battery, telling it of what the observer had seen beyond the ridge. Between the aeroplane, the observer, the telephone, and the guns, there seemed to be some mysterious freemasonry. And this impression of secret and collusive agencies was heightened by the vibration of the air above us, in which the shells from the batteries made furrows that were audible without being visible, as though the whole firmament were populated with disembodied spirits. The passivity of the toilers in the field below us, who, absorbed in their husbandry, regarded not the air abovethem, and the dreaming beauty of the distant city almost persuaded us that we were the victims of a gigantic illusion. But even as we gazed the city acquired a desperate and tragic reality. Voices of thunder awoke behind the ridge, the air was rent like a garment, and first one cloud and then another and another rose above the city of Ypres, till the white towers were blotted out of sight. A black pall floated over the doomed city, and from that moment the air was never still, as a rhythm of German shells rained upon it. The storm spread until other villages were involved, and a fierce red glow appeared above the roofs of Vlamertinge.

Yet the clouds and flame that rose above the white towers had at that distance a flagrant beauty of their own, and it was hard to believe that they stood for death, desolation, and the agony of men. Beyond the voluminous smoke and darting tongues of fire, our field-glasses could show us nothing. But we knew—for we had seen but yesterday—that behind that haze there was being perpetrated a destruction as mournful and capricious as that which in the vision upon the Mount of Olives overtook Jerusalem. Where two were in the street one was even now being taken and the other left; he who was upon the housetop would not come down to take anything out of his house, neither would he who was in the field return to take away his clothes.The great cathedral was crumbling to dust, and saints, apostles, prophets, martyrs were being hurled from their niches of stone, the Virgin alone standing unscathed upon her pedestal contemplating the ruin and tribulation around her. And we knew that while we gazed the roads from the doomed city to Locre and Poperinghe were choked with a terror-stricken stream of fugitives, ancient men hobbling upon sticks, aged women clutching copper pans, and stumbling under the weight of feather-beds, while whimpering children fumbled among their mothers' skirts. What convulsive eddies each of the shells, whose trajectory we heard ever and anon in the skies overhead, were making in that living stream were to us a subject of poignant speculation.

But as I looked immediately around me I found it ever more difficult to believe that such things were being done upon the earth. The carpenter went on hammering, stopping but for a moment to shade his eyes with his hand and gaze out over the plain, the peasants in the field continued to hoe, a woman came out of a cottage with a child clinging to her skirts, and said, "La guerre, quand finira-t-elle, M'sieu'?" From far above us the song of the lark, now lost to sight in the aerial blue, floated down upon the drowsy air.

It was dinner hour in the Mess. There were some dozen of us all told—the Camp Commandant, the Deputy-Assistant-Adjutant-General, the Assistant-Provost-Marshal, the Assistant-Director of Medical Services, the Sanitary Colonel (which adjective has nothing to do with his personal habits), the Judge-Advocate, two men of the Intelligence, apadre, and myself. Most of us were known by our initials—our official initials—for the use of them saves time and avoids pomposity. Our duties were both extensive and peculiar, as will presently appear, for we were in the habit of talking shop. There was, indeed, little else to talk about. When you are billeted in a small town in Flanders with no amusements and few amenities—neither theatres, nor sport, nor books—and with little prospect of getting a move on, you can but chronicle the small beer of your quotidian adventures. And these be engaging enough at times.

As we sat down to the stew which our orderly had compounded with the assistance of the ingenious Mr. Maconochie, the Camp Commandant sighed heavily. "I am a kind of receptacle for the waste products of everybody's mind," he exclaimed petulantly. "This morning I was rung up on the telephone and asked if I would bury a dead horse for the Canadian Division; I told them I hadn't a Prayer Book and it couldn't be done. Then two nuns called and asked me to find a discreet soldier—un soldat discret—to escort them to Hazebrouck; I told them to take my servant, who is a married man with five children. Then an old lady sent round to ask me to come and drown her cat's kittens; I said it was impossible, as she hadn't complied with the Notification of Births Act."

The Mess listened to this plaintive recital in unsympathetic silence. Perhaps they reflected that as the Camp Commandant is one of those to whom much, in the way of perquisites of office, is given, from him much may legitimately be expected. "Well, you may think yourself lucky you haven't my job," said the Deputy-Assistant-Adjutant-General at length. "I'm getting rather fed up with casualty lists and strength returns. I'm like the man who boasted that his chief literary recreation was reading Bradshaw, except that I don'tboast of it and it isn't a recreation—it's damned hard work. I have to read the Army List for about ten hours every day, for if I get an officer's initials wrong there's the devil to pay. And I spent half an hour between the telephone and the Army List to-day trying to find out who 'Teddy' was. The 102nd Welsh sent him in with their returns of officers' casualties as having died of heart failure on the 22nd inst."

"Well, but who is 'Teddy,' anyhow?" asked the Camp Commandant.

"He is the regimental goat," replied the D.A.A.G. "I suppose they thought it amusing. When I tumbled to it I told their Brigade Headquarters on the telephone that I quite understood their making him a member of their mess, as they belonged to the same species."

"Wait until you've had to track down a case of typhoid in billets," said the R.A.M.C. man who looks after infectious diseases. "I've been on the trail of a typhoid epidemic at La Croix Farm, where a company of the Downshires are billeted, and it made me sad. They had their filters with them and they swore they hadn't touched a drop of impure water, and that they treasured our regulations like the book of Leviticus. And yet the trail of that typhoid was all over my spot chart, and the thing was spreading like one of the seven plaguesof Egypt. At last I tracked it down to an Army cook; the rotter had had typhoid about five years ago and simply poisoned everything he touched. He was what we call a carrier."

"What did you do with him?" said the A.D.M.S.

"He won't do any more cooking; I've sent him home. The fellow's a perfect leper, and ought to be interned like an alien enemy."

"Well, I'd rather have your job than mine even if prevention is more honourable than cure," said he whom we know as "Smells," and who has a nose like a fox-terrier's. "I am theavant-gardeof the Staff, and you fellows can thank me that you are so merry and bright. If I didn't make my sanitary reconnaissances with my chloride of lime and fatigue parties, where would you all be?"

"We should all be home on sick-leave and very pleased to get it," said the A.P.M. ungratefully.

"Themairethinks I'm mad, of course," continued 'Smells,' "and I can't make him understand that cesspools and open sewers in the street are not conducive to health."

"I expect they think we're rather too fond of spreading broad our phylacteries," said the Assistant Provost Marshal. "Now I'm a sort of licensing authority, Brewster Sessions in fact, for this commune, and theestaminetproprietors think I'ma Temperance fanatic," he said, as he put forth his hand for the whisky bottle. "One of them told me the other day he preferred a German occupation to a British one, because the Huns let him sell as much spirits to their men as he liked. And yet I'm sure the little finger of a French provost-marshal is thicker than my loins any day."

"Yes," said the Camp Commandant, "it's our melancholy duty to be impertinent. I'm supposed to read all you fellows' letters before I stamp them. I'd be rather glad if they were liable to be censored again at the Base or somewhere elseen route; it would relieve me of any compunction about the first reading, the text and preamble of the envelope would be good enough for me. You fellows write abominably."

"I'm something of a handwriting expert myself," said the A.P.M., ignoring the aspersion. "They have changed the colour of the passes again this month, and so I'm engaged in a fresh study of the A.G.'s signature; I believe he changes his style of handwriting with the colour of the pass. I wonder what is the size of the A.G.'s bank balance," he murmured dreamily; "I believe I could now forge his signature very artistically."

"I wish some one would start a school of handwriting at G.H.Q.," said the A.D.M.S. "I believe I receive more chits than any man on thestaff." "Chits," it should be explained, are the billets-doux of the Army wherein officers send tender messages to one another and make assignations.

"Did you hear about that chit the Camp Commandant at the Headquarters of the ——th Corps sent to the A.Q.M.G.?" asked the A.P.M. "No? Well, the A.Q.M.G. of the other Army wrote to Ferrers asking if they had made use of any Ammonal and, if so, whether the results were satisfactory. Ferrers sent it on to the Camp Commandant for report and the Camp Commandant wrote back a chit saying plaintively, 'This is not understood. For what purpose is Ammonal used—is it a drug or an explosive?' Ferrers told him to ask the Medical Officer attached to Corps headquarters, which he did. Thereupon he wrote back another chit to Ferrers, saying that the M.O. had informed him that 'Ammonal' was a compound drug extensively used in America in cases of abnormal neurotic excitement, and that, so far as he knew, it was not a medical issue to Corps H.Q. He therefore regretted that he was unable to report results, but promised that if occasion should arise to administer it to any of the Corps H.Q.personnelhe would faithfully observe the effects and report the same. When the A.Q.M.G. read the reply he betrayed a quite abnormal degree of neurotic excitement; in fact, he was quite nasty about it."

"What the devil did he mean?" asked the A.D.M.S.

"Well, that points the moral of your remarks about handwriting," said the A.P.M. encouragingly. "The Camp Commandant had written what looked like an 'o' in place of an 'a.' Ammonol is a drug; ammonal is an explosive."

"Well, I wish some one would teach the Huns how to write decently." The speaker was Summersby of the Intelligence Corps. The Intelligence are a corps of detectives and have to estimate the strength, the location, and the composition of the enemy's forces. Everything is grist that comes to their mill and they will perform surprising feats of induction. They can reconstruct a German Army Corps out of a Landwehr man's bootlace, his diary, his underclothing, or his shoulder-strap—but the greatest of these is his diary. "I've been studying the diaries of prisoners until I feel a Hun myself. They remind me of the diary I used to keep at school, they are all about eating and drinking. The Hun is a glutton and a wine-bibber. But I found something to-day—'Keine Gefangene' in an officer's field note-book."

"Translate, my Hunnish friend," said the A.P.M.

"No prisoners," replied Summersby shortly.

"I hope you handed the swine over to the P.M.," said the Camp Commandant.

"Well, no," said Summersby. "You see he had a plausible explanation—by the way, what perfect English those German officers talk; I'll bet that man has eaten our bread and salt some time. He said it was a Brigade order to the men not to make the taking of prisoners a pretext for going back to the rear in large parties but to leave them to the supports when they came up. The curious thing is that that officer belongs to the 112th and we've our eye on the 112th. One of their men, a fellow named Schmidt, who surrendered on the 19th of last month, said they'd had an order to take no prisoners but kill them all. His regiment was the 112th," he added darkly.

"The filthy swine!" we cried in a chorus, and our talk grew sombre as we exchanged reminiscences.

"What pleases me about you fellows," said Ponsonby, who had been listening with a languid air, and who was formerly in the F.O. where he composed florid speeches in elegant French for Hague Plenipotentiaries, "is your habits of speech. In diplomacy we contrive to talk a lot without saying anything, whereas Army men manage to talk little and say a great deal. You've got four words in the Army which seem to be a mighty present help in trouble at H.Q. Their sustaining properties are remarkable and they seem to tide over veryanxious moments. When you are in a hole you say 'Damn all,' and when you are asked for instructions you cry 'Carry on.' I suppose it's by sitting tight and using those words with discrimination that you fellows arrive at greatness and attain Brigadier rank. That seems to be the first thing a third-grade staff-officer learns."

"The first thing a third-grade staff-officer learns is to speak respectfully of his superiors," said the A.P.M., as he hurled a cushion at Ponsonby, who caught it with a bow. Ponsonby is irrepressible and, in spite of his supercilious civilian airs, much is forgiven him. He turned to the D.A.A.G. and said, "Hooper, you've forgotten to say grace. For what we havenotreceived"—he added, with a meaning glance at a Stilton cheese which the A.A.G.'s wife has sent out from home and which remained on the sideboard—"the Lord make us truly thankful." This was an allusion to the D.A.A.G.'s sacerdotal functions. For the Adjutant-General and his staff, who know the numbers of all the Field Ambulances, can lay hands—but not in the apostolic sense—upon every chaplain attached thereto; the A.G. is the Metropolitan of them all and can admonish, deprive, and suspend.

The D.A.A.G. ignored the plaintive benediction. "I think we've fixed it up with those Red Cross drivers," he said complacently. The A.G.'s department had been wrestling with the disciplinary problem presented by these birds of passage on the lines of communication. "We've decided that they are Army followers under section 176, sub-section 10, of the Army Act, and that you 'follow' the British Army from the moment you accept a pass to H.Q. My chief called some of them together yesterday, and being in a benevolent humour told them that they were now under military law and might be sentenced to anything from seven days' field-punishment to the punishment of death. This waspour encourager les autres. They looked quite thoughtful."

"That's a nice point," commented Ponsonby pensively. "Should an Army follower be hanged or is he entitled to be shot? I put it to you," he added, turning to the Judge-Advocate. "I want counsel's opinion."

"I never give abstract opinions," retorted the man of law. "But the safest course would be to hang him first and shoot him afterwards."

"Your counsel is as the counsel of Ahithophel," said Ponsonby. "I'll put you another problem. Is a carrier-pigeon an Army follower? Because Slingsby never has any appetite for dinner" (this was notoriously untrue), "and I have a strong suspicion that he converts—that's a legal expression for fraud, isn't it?—his carrier-pigeonsinto pigeon-pie. What is the penalty for fraudulent conversion of an Army follower?" Slingsby, who in virtue of his aquiline features is known asAquila vulgaris, has charge of the carrier-pigeons and takes large baskets of them out to the Front every day; he is supposed to be training them by an intimate use of pigeon-English not to settle when the shells explode. Unfortunately his pigeons are usually posted as "missing," and go to some bourne from which no pigeon has ever been known to return. Ponsonby glances suspiciously at Slingsby's portly figure.

But the Judge-Advocate had stolen away to study a dossier of "proceedings," and his departure was the signal for a general dispersion. "Come and have a drink," said Ponsonby to the "I" man. "Can't, you slacker," was the reply. "I've got to go and make up an 'I' summary. 'Notes of an Air Reconnaissance. Distribution of the enemy's forces. Copy of a German Divisional Circular. Notes on the German system of signalling from their trenches.' You know the usual kind of thing. Just now we're trying to discover how many guns they've got in the batteries of their new formations. We've noticed that their 77-mm. projectiles now arrive in groups of four, and we suspect that two guns have been withdrawn. But it may be only a blind."

As we turned out into the darkened street to make our way to our respective offices a supply column rumbled over thepavé, each of the seventy-two motor-lorries keeping its distance like the ships of a fleet. Despatch-riders with blue and white armlets whizzed past on their motor-bicycles, and high overhead was the loud droning hum of the aeroplane going home to roost. The thunder of guns was clearly audible from the north-east. The D.A.A.G. turned to me and said, "It's Hill 60 again. My old regiment's up there. And to-morrow the casualty returns will come in. Good God! will it never end?"

PARQUETduTribunal de IèreInstanced'Ypres

At last I had found it. I had spent a mournful morning at Ypres seeking out theprocureur du roi, and I had sought in vain. He was nowhere to be found. Ypres was a city of catacombs, wrapt in a winding-sheet of mortar, fine as dust, which rose in clouds as the German shells winnowed among the ruins. The German guns had been threshing the ancient city like flails, beating her out of all recognition, beating her into shapes strange, uncouth, and lamentable. The Cloth Hall was little more than a deserted cloister of ruined arches, and the cathedral presented a spectacle at once tragic and whimsical—the brass lectern still stood upright in the nave confronting a congregation of overturned chairs as with a gesture of reproof. The sight of those scrambling chairs all huddled togetherand fallen headlong upon one another had something oddly human about it; it suggested a panic of ghosts. Ypres is an uncanny place.

We returned to Poperinghe, our way choked by a column of French troops, pale, hollow-eyed, their blue uniforms bleached by sun and rain until all the virtue of the dye had run out of them. Before resuming our hunt for theprocureur du roi—who, we now found, had removed from Ypres to Poperinghe—we entered a restaurant for lunch. It was crowded with French officers, with whom a full-bosomed, broad-hipped Flemish girl exchanged uncouth pleasantries, and it possessed a weird and uncomely boy, who regarded A——, the Staff officer accompanying me, with a hypnotic stare. He peered at him from under drooping eyelids, flanking a nose without a bridge, and my companion didn't like it. "He is admiring you," I remarked by way of consolation, as indeed he was. "What do you call it?" said A—— petulantly to a R.A.M.C. officer who was lunching with us. The latter looked at the boy with a clinical eye. "Necrosis—syphilitic," he said dispassionately. "And he's handing us the cakes!" A—— exclaimed with horror. "Fetch me an ounce of civet." We declined the cakes, and, having paid ouraddition, hastily departed to resume our quest of theprocureur.

Eventually we found the legend set out above. It was a placard stuck on the door of a private house. We entered and found ourselves in a kitchen with a stone floor; japanned tin boxes, calf-bound volumes, and fat registers, all stamped with the arms of Belgium, were grouped on the shelves of the dresser. A courteous gentleman, well-groomed and debonair, with waxed moustaches, greeted us. It was theprocureur du roi. With him was another civilian—thejuge d'instruction. They politely requested us to take a seat and to excuse a judicial preoccupation. Thejuge d'instructionwas interrogating an inhabitant of Poperinghe. Theprocureurexplained to me that theprévenu(the accused), who was not present but was within the precincts, was charged withcalomnie[27]under Section 444 of theCode Pénal. "But," I exclaimed in astonishment, "are you still administering justice?" "Pourquoi non?" he asked in mild surprise. It was true, he admitted, that his office at Ypres had been destroyed by shell-fire, themaison d'arrêt—in plain English, the prison—was open to the four winds of heaven, and warders and gendarmes had been called up to the colours. But justice must be done and the majesty of the King of the Belgians upheld. The King's writ still ran, even though its currencymight be limited to the few square miles which were all that remained of Belgian territory in Belgian hands. All this he explained to me with such gravity that I felt further questions would be futile, if not impertinent. I therefore held my tongue and determined to follow the proceedings closely, being not a little curious to observe how the judgment would be enforced.

The witness took the oath to say the truth and nothing but the truth ("rien que la vérité"), concluding with the solemn invocation, "Ainsi m'aide Dieu." The parties had elected to have the proceedings taken in French.

"Your name?" said the judge, as he studied the procès-verbal prepared by theprocureur.

"Jules F——."

"Age?"

"Cinquante-cinq."

"Profession?"

"Cordonnier."

"Résidence?"

"Rue d'Ypres 32."

This preliminary catechism being completed, the prosecutor unfolded his tale. He had been drinking the health of His Majesty the King of the Belgians and confusion to his enemies in anestaminetat the crowded hour of 7p.m. The accused had entered, and in the presence of manyof his neighbours had said to him, "Vous êtes un Bosche." "Un Bosche!" repeated the witness indignantly. "It is a gross defamation." With difficulty had he been restrained from the shedding of blood. But, being a law-abiding, peaceful man and the father of a family, he volubly explained, he had laid this information ("dénonciation") before theprocureur du roi.

The judge looked grave. But he duly noted down the testimony, after some perfunctory cross-examination, and, it being read over to the witness, the judge added "Lecture faite," and the persisting witness signed the deposition with his own hand. The prosecutor having retired, two other witnesses, whom he had vouched to warranty, came forward and testified to the same effect. And they also signed their depositions and withdrew.

The magistrate ordered the usher to bring in the accused, who had been summoned to appear by amandat d'amener. He was a stout, dark, convivial-looking soul, with a merry eye, not altogether convinced of the enormity of his delict, and inclined at first to deprecate these proceedings. But the dialectical skill of the magistrate soon tied him into knots, and reduced him to a state of extreme penitence.

"Where were you on the 3rd of April at 7p.m.?"began the magistrate, making what gunners call a ranging shot. The accused appeared to have been everywhere in Poperinghe except at theestaminet. He had been to the butcher's, the baker's, and the candlestick-maker's.

"At what hour did you enter the Café à l'Harmonie?"

The accused tried to look as if he now heard of the Café "À l'Harmonie" for the first time, but under the searching eye of the magistrate he failed. He might, he conceded, have looked in there for a thirsty moment.

"Do you know Jules F——?" the magistrate persisted. The accused grudgingly admitted the existence of such a person. "Is he a German?" asked the magistrate pointedly. The accused pondered. "Would you call him a Bosche?" persisted the magistrate. "I nevermeantto call him 'a Bosche,'" the accused said in an unguarded moment. The magistrate pounced on him. He had found the range. After that the result was a foregone conclusion. The duel ended in the accused tearfully admitting he thought he must have been drunk, and throwing himself on the mercy of the magistrate.

"It is a grave offence," said the magistrate severely, as he contemplated the lachrymose delinquent. "Anestaminetis a public place withinthe meaning of Section 444 of the Code Pénal. Vous avez méchamment imputé à une personne un fait précis qui est de nature à porter atteinte à son honneur." "And calculated to provoke a breach of the peace," he added. "It is punishable with a term of imprisonment not exceeding one year." The face of the accused grew long. "Or a fine of 200 francs," he pursued. The lips of the accused quivered. "You may have to go to amaison de correction," continued the magistrate pitilessly. The accused wept.

I grew more and more interested. If this was a "correctional" offence, the magistrate must in the ordinary course of things commit the prisoner to achambre de conseil, thereafter to take his trial before a Tribunal Correctionnel. But chamber and tribunal were scattered to the four corners of the earth.

Here, I felt sure, the whole proceedings must collapse and the magistrate be sadly compelled to admit his impotence. The magistrate, however, appeared in nowise perturbed, nor did he for a moment relax his authoritative expression. He was turning over the pages of theCode d'Instruction Criminelle, glancing occasionally at a now wholly penitent prisoner trembling before the majesty of the law. At last he spoke. "I will deal with you," he said with an air of indulgence, "under ChapterVIII. of the Code. You will be bound over to come up for judgment at the end of the war if called upon. You will deposit acautionnementof twenty francs. And now, gentlemen, we are at your service."

"Fiat justitia ruat coelum," whispered A—— to me, as the prisoner, deeply impressed, opened a leather purse and counted out four greasy five-franc notes.

FOOTNOTE:[27]Defamation. It is a misdemeanour according to Belgian law.

[27]Defamation. It is a misdemeanour according to Belgian law.

British Headquarters must, I think, be the biggest Military Academy in the world. It has its Sandhurst and its Woolwich and even its Camberley. It ought long ago to have been incorporated by Order in Council as a University with Sir John French as Chancellor. It has more schools in the Art of War than I can remember, and every School has an Instructor who deserves to rank as a full-time Professor. To graduate in one of those schools you must get a fortnight's leave from your trenches or your battery, at the end of which time you return to do a little post-graduate work of a very practical kind with the aid of a machine-gun or a trench-mortar. At the beginning of the war higher education at G.H.Q. was somewhat neglected, and the company officer who desired to improve himself in the lethal arts had to be content with private study. Company officers went in for applied chemistry by making flares out of a test-tube full of water, delicately balanced in a bully-beef tin containing sodium. The tins were tied to the barbed-wire entanglements in front of our trenches, and when the stealthy Hun, creeping on his stomach, bumped against the wire the test-tube overflowed into the tin and a lurid patch of greenish flame revealed the clumsy visitor to our look-outs. That was before we were supplied with calcium flares. Then, too, the sappers went in for experimental research by making trench-mortars out of old stove-pipes.

To-day all that is changed. A chemical corps has come out to join the sappers, and the gunners have received some highly finished trench-mortars from Vickers's. A trench mortar is a kind of toy howitzer and very useful when you want to try conclusions with a neighbouring trench at short range. The mortars are not exactly things to play with, and so two "schools" of mortars have been instituted to teach R.G.A. men how to handle them. Every morning at nine o'clock two young subalterns meet their class of fifty pupils in a château, and explain with the aid of a diagram on a blackboard the internal economy of the mortar and its 50-lb. bomb, the adjustment of angles of elevation to ranges, and the respective offices of fuse, charge, and detonator. When the class have had enough of this they go off to a neighbouringfield to simulate trench warfare and hold a demonstration. This is real sport. They have dug a sector of trenches, duly traversed, and at some two or three hundred yards distance have dug another sector and decorated it realistically with barbed-wire entanglements. Thither one afternoon we conveyed the mortar to the first trenches on an improvised carriage, placed it behind one of the traverses, and duly clamped it down. The subaltern took up a periscope and got the thread-line on the target—you find the range without instruments and by your own intuitions. "Three hundred, I think," he remarked pensively. A pupil adjusted the range indicator at 71·30 to get the elevation, and his assistant took up what looked like a huge jar of preserved ginger. It was the bomb. Having put the tail to it he inserted the detonator. "Fuse at 27." He set the indicator with as much care as if he were setting the hands of his watch. The man took the fuse delicately, put in the test-tube and attached the lanyard. These operations had been closely followed by the class, who made a circle round the bomb like a football "scrum." It was now time to line the trenches, for the "tail" of the bomb is apt to kick viciously when the thing is fired. As they spread out, the man removed the two safety-pins in the top of the fuse and pulled the lanyard. There wasa voice of thunder and a sheet of flame, followed by what seemed an interminable pause. We scanned the brown furrows in front of us and suddenly the earth shot skywards in a fan; a cloud of dirty-black smoke floated over our target. The whole class leapt the parapet and streamed away across the furrows like a pack of hounds in full cry, until they suddenly disappeared below the surface of the earth. We followed and found them standing in a huge crater whose sides were hollowed out as neatly as those of a cup. "Done it again," said the subaltern complacently, "we've never had a blind."

At the Machine-gun School they do things on a larger scale, and Wren's could teach them nothing in the art of cramming. The Instructor reckons to put his class of 200 officers and men through a six months' course in a fortnight. There is need for it. The Germans started this war with eleven machine-guns (it is now anything from twenty to forty) to a battalion. We started with two. For years they have enlisted, trained, and paid a special class of men to man them. Consequently we had a great deal of leeway to make up. We are making it up, hand over fist, thanks to the Instructor, one of the most brilliant and devoted officers I know, and a man who spends his nights in inventing or perfecting improvements. He has got a pocketedition of a machine-gun made of tempered steel and weighing only 27 lb., as against our old one, which is of gun-metal and weighs 58 lb.—a material difference when it is a question of an advance. The new one, he explains somewhat illogically, with paternal pride, can be carried into action "like a baby." Having decided to give it a trial we carried it tenderly to a quarry and proceeded to "feed" it with a belt of cartridges. The Instructor set up a small stick against the bank of a gravel quarry and returned and adjusted the tangent-sight at 100 on the standard. He got the fore-sight and back-sight in a line on the stick, seized the traversing-handles, released the safety-catch, and pressed the button with his right thumb with the persistency of a man who cannot make the waiter answer the electric bell. "Tap—tap—tap." There was a series of explosions as though the sparking plug of a motor-bicycle was playing tricks. The target danced like a thing possessed. It hopped and skipped and curtsied under that deadly stream of bullets. Then he slowly swept that gravel bank with the traversing handles till the pebbles jumped like hailstones. "I think she'll do," he remarked appreciatively as he folded up the tripod.

The R.E. is the Army's school of technology. To do a survey or make a bridge or lay a telephoneis all in the day's work. But your sapper is a man of ideas, and is for ever seeking out new inventions. So he has turned his attention to chemistry, and "R.E." has a chemical corps which has put aside the blow-pipe and the test-tube at home to come out and study the applied chemistry of war. Just now they are engaged in discovering the most effective method of laying noxious gases. Copper vessels of ammonia in a trench to disperse the gas when it gets there are all very well, but by that time you may have more pressing attentions of the enemy to engage you; the thing is to prevent the gas getting there. Hence ingenious minds are considering how to project with a spray something upon the advancing fog which will bring it to earth in the form of an innocuous compound. Spray that something over the parapet, and if you can spray it far enough and wide enough you may precipitate the deadly green and brown mists into chlorides or bromides which will be as harmless as bleaching-powder and not less salubrious.

Others have turned their attention to automatic flares. You can get a startling illuminant if you suspend a test-tube containing sulphuric acid in a vessel of chlorate of potash, and it will be all the better if you add a little common sugar and salt. You balance your test-tube in the hollow of a bamboo stick and fill the top knot of the stick withthe chlorate of potash; then you plant your sticks, not too securely, outside your barbed-wire entanglements, and string them together with a trip-wire. As for the patrolling Hun who bumps against that trip-wire, it were better for him that a millstone were hung round his neck.

This is Higher Education and post-graduate research. But elementary education is not neglected. At the H.Q. of the —th Corps is an O.T.C. where privates in the H.A.C. and the Artists practise the precepts of theInfantry Manualand study night operations in the meadows within sound of the guns.

Truly it is, in the words of the stout Puritan, a nation not slow and dull but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to.

The little towns of Flanders and Artois are Aire, Hazebrouck, Bethune, Armentières, Bailleul, Poperinghe, and Cassel. They are known in the Army vernacular as Air, Hazybrook, Betoon, Arm-in-tears, Ballyhool (occasionally Belial), Poperingy, and Kassel. The fairest of these is Cassel. For Cassel is set upon a hill which rises from the interminable plain, salient and alluring as a tor in Somerset, and seems to say to the fretful wayfarer, "Come unto Me all ye that are weary, and I will give you rest." For upon the hill of Cassel the air is sweet and fresh, the slopes are musical with a faint lullaby of falling showers, as the wind plays among the birches and the poplars, and over all there is a great peace. The motor-lorries avoid the declivities of Cassel, and the horsemen pass by on the other side. Some twenty windmills—no less and perhaps more—areperched like dovecots on the hill, lifting their sails to the blue sky. Some day I will seek out a notary at Cassel and will get him to execute a deed of conveyance assigning to me, with no restrictive covenants, the freehold of one of those mills, for I have coveted a mill ever since I succumbed to the enchantments ofLettres de mon moulin. True, Flanders is not Provence, and the croaking of the frogs, croak they never so amorously, among the willows in the plains below is a poor exchange for the chant of thecigale. But these mills look out over a landscape that is now dearer to me than Abana and Pharpar, for many a gallant friend of mine lies beneath its sod.

Cassel is approached by a winding road that turns and returns upon itself like a corkscrew, and is bordered by an avenue of trees. It has a bandstand—what town in Flanders and Artois has not?—and a church. Cheek by jowl with the church is a place of convenience, which seems to me profane in more senses than one. I have never been able to make up my mind whether such secularisation of a church wall is the expression of anti-clerical antipathies, or of a clerical common-sense peculiarly French in its practical and unblushing acceptance of the elementary facts of life. But about Cassel I am not so sure. The sight of that shameless annexe is too familiar inFrance to please our fastidious English tastes—it seems to express a truculent nonconformity, it is too like a dissenting chapel-of-ease.

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