And then, wherever you went, till the frontier was reached, everyone was your host and your friend; all the relations of strangers to one another had been transfigured into the sum of all kindness and courtesy. In one mining village in Flanders, quitted that day by the Germans, a woman rushed out of a house to give me a lump of bread, thinking that we must all be as hungry as she and her neighbours. Late one night in Brussels, just after the Germans had gone, I was walking with another officer down the chief street of the city, then densely crowded with radiant citizens. My friend had a wooden stump leg and could not walk very well; and this figure of a khaki-clad man, maimed in the discharge of an Allied obligation to Belgium, seemed suddenly and almost simultaneously to be seen by the whole of that great crowd in all its symbolic value, so that the crowd fell silent and opened out spontaneously along the whole length of the street and my friend had to hobble down the middle of a long avenue of bare-headed men and bowing women. Finally--last happy thrill of the war--the first stroke of eleven o'clock, on the morning of Armistice Day, on the town clock of Mons, only captured that morning; Belgian civilians and British soldiers crowding together into the square, shaking each other's hands and singing each other's national anthems; a little toy-like peal of bells in the church contriving to tinkle out "Tipperary" for our welcome, while our airmen, released from their labours, tumbled and romped overhead like boys turning cartwheels with ecstasy. What a victory it might have been--the real, the Winged Victory, chivalric, whole and unstained! The bride that our feckless wooing had sought and not won in the generous youth of the war had come to us now: an old woman, or dead, she no longer refused us. We had arrived, like the prince in the poem-- Too late for love, too late for joy, Too late, too late! You loitered on the road too long, You trifled at the gate: The enchanted dove upon her branch Died without a mate; The enchanted princess in her tower Slept, died behind the grate: Her heart was starving all this while You made it wait. CHAPTER XIII THE OLD AGE OF THE WAR I