He had lost his wife a week before the war, and in the siege of Liège one of his sons had fallen, and he had lost his home, and everything he held dear. He was an enormous man, dressed in deep black, the most pronounced mourning you can possibly imagine, with a great black pot-hat coming well down on his huge face. His big frame quivered like a jelly, as he sat in the corner of the train, and was shaken by the rough movements and the frequent stoppages. Yet he became cheerful, just as cheerful as any of us. Strange as it seems in the telling, this cheerfulness is a normal condition of the people nearest the front. There is only one thing that kills it, loss of freedom when loss of freedom means loss of companionship. Ruin, danger, cold, hunger, heat, dirt, discomfort, wounds, suffering, death, are all dashed with glory, and become acceptable as part of the greatest adventure in the world. But loss of freedom wrings the colour from the brain, and shuts out this world and the next when it entails loss of comradeship. When I first realised this strange phenomenon I thought it would take a volume of psychology to explain it. And then, all suddenly, with no effort of thought, I found the explanation revealing itself in one magic blessed word,--_Companionship._ Out here in the danger-zones, the irksome isolation of ordinary lives has vanished. We are no longer alone; there are no such things as strangers; we are all together wherever we are; in the trenches, on the roads, in the trams, in the cities, in the villages, we all talk to each other, we all know each other's histories, we pour out our hopes and fears, we receive the warm, sweet stimulus of human comradeship multiplied out of all proportion to anything that life has ever offered any single one of us before, till even pain and death take on more gentle semblance seen with the eyes of a million people all holding hands. Young men who have not gone, go now! Find out for yourselves whether this wonderful thing that I tell you is not true, that the battle-field, apart from its terrific and glorious qualities, holds also that secret of gaiety of heart that mankind is ever searching for! We were at St. Nicolla now, and it was nearly dark, and our train was at a standstill. "I'll get out and see what's the matter," said the young lawyer, whom I shall refer to hereafter as Jean. He came back in a minute looking serious. "The train doesn't go any further!" he said. "There's no train for Ghent to-night." We all got out, clutching our bags, and stood there on the platform in the reddened dusk that was fast passing into night. A Pontonnier, who had been in the train with us, came up and said he was expecting an automobile to meet him here, and perhaps he could give some of us a lift as far as Ghent. However, his automobile didn't turn up, and that little plan fell through.