He flings back his head, draws a deep breath, and remains staring like an imbecile at the roof of the railway carriage for quite two minutes. Then he shakes himself, draws another deep breath, and says again, still staring at the roof: "Five days!" The train has started now out into the night. We have left Folkestone well behind. We have pulled down all the blinds because a proclamation commands us to do so, and we are softly, yet swiftly rushing through the cool, sweet-smelling English country back towards good old Victoria Station, where all continental trains must now make their arrivals and departures. "Have you been wounded, Sir?" asks an old lady in a queer black astrakhan cap, and with a big nose. "Wounded? Rather! Right on top of the head." He ducks his fair head to shew us. "I didn't know it when it happened. I didn't feel anything at all. I only knew there was something wet. Blood, I suppose. Then they sent me to the Hospital at S. Lazaire, and I had a ripping Cornish nurse. But lor, what a fool I was! I actually signed on that I wanted to go back. Why did I do that? I don't know. I didn't want to go back. _Want to go back?_ Good lor! Think of it! But I went back! and the next thing was Mons! Even now I can't believe it, that march. The Germans were at us all the time. It didn't seem possible we could do it. 'Buck up, men! only another six kilometres!' an officer would say. Then it would be: 'Only another seven kilometres! keep going, men!' Sometimes we went to sleep marching and woke up and found ourselves still marching. Always we were shifting and relieving. It was a wonderful business. It seemed as if we were done for. It seemed as if we couldn't go on. But we did. Good lor! _We did it!_ Somehow the English generally seem to do it. Some of us had no boots left. Some of us had no feet. _But WE DID IT!_'" The old lady with the black astrakhan cap nods vigorously. "And the Germans wouldn't acknowledge that victory of ours," she says! "I didn't see it in any of their papers." It is rather lovely to hear the dear creature alluding to Mons as "our victory!" But indeed she is right. Mons is, in truth, our glory and our pride! But it is still more startling to find she knows secret things about the German newspapers, and we all look at her sharply. "I've just come from Germany!" the old lady explains. "Just come from Dresden, where I've been living for fifteen years. Oh dear! I did have a time getting away. But I had to leave! They made me. _Dresden is being turned into a fortified town and a basis for operations!_" We all now listen to _her_, the soldiers three as well.