And our soldiers love his yarns! CHAPTER LII THE RAVENING WOLF How hard it must be for the soldiers to remember chat there ever was Summer! How far off, how unreal are those burning, breathless days that saw the fighting round Namur, Termonde, Antwerp. Here in Flanders, in December, August and September seem to belong to centuries gone by. Ugh! How cold it is! The wind howls up and down this long, white, snow-covered road, and away on either side, as far as the eyes can see, stretches wide flat Flanders country, white and glistening, with the red sun sinking westward, and the pale little silvery moon smiling her pale little smile through the black bare woods. In this little old Flemish village from somewhere across the snow the thunder and fury of terrific fighting makes sleep impossible for more than five minutes at a time. Then suddenly something wakes me, and I know at once, even before I am quite awake, that it is not shell-fire this time. What is it? I sit up in bed, and feel for the matches. But before I can strike one I hear again that extraordinary and very horrible sound. I lie quite still. And now a strange thing has happened. In a flash my thoughts have gone back over years and years and years, and it is twenty-eight years ago and I have crossed thousands and thousands of "loping leagues of sea," and am in Australia, in the burning heat of mid-summer. I am a schoolgirl spending my Christmas holidays in the Australian bush. It is night. I am a nervous little highly-strung creature. A noise wakes me. I shriek and wake the household. When they come dashing in I sob out pitifully. "There's a wolf outside the window, I heard it howling!" "It's only a dingo, darling!" says a woman's tender voice, consolingly. "It's only a native dog trying to find water! It can't get in here anyway." I remember too, that I was on the ground floor then, and I am on the ground floor now, and I find myself wishing I could hear that comforting voice again, telling me this is only a dingo, this horrible howling thing outside there in the night. I creep out of bed, and tiptoe to the window. Quite plainly in the silvery moonlight I see, standing in the wide open space in front of this little Flemish Inn, a thin gaunt animal with its tongue lolling out. I see the froth on the tongue, and the yellow-white of its fangs glistening in the winter moonlight. I ask myself what is it? And I ask too why should I feel so frightened? For I _am_ frightened. From behind the white muslin curtains I gaze at that apparition, absolutely petrified. It seems to me that I shall never, never, never be able to move again when I find myself knocking at the Caspiar's door, and next minute the old proprietor of the Inn and his wife are peeping through my window. "Mon Dieu! It is a wolf!" Old Caspiar frames the word with his lips rather than utter them. "You must shoot it," frames his wife. Old Caspiar gets down his gun. But it falls from his hands.