Quick waste and renewal are said to be good for the body; the faster you burn up old tissues, by good sweaty work, the better your health; fresh and superior tissue is added unto you all the more merrily. Capital, too, the economists say, must be swiftly used up and reborn, over and over again, to do the most good that it can. And then there is the case of the phoenix--in fact, of all the birds and all the beasts too, for all evolution would seem to be just the dying of something worse, as fast as it can, in order that something better may live in its place. No need for delay in turning your anthropoid apes into Shakespeares and Newtons. But what if you found, after all your hard work, that not all the deceased cells of your flesh were replaced by new cells of the sort you would like? If some of your good golden pounds should have perished only that inconvertible paper might live? If out of your phoenix's ashes only a common-place rooster should spring? If evolution were guyed and bedevilled into retrovolution, a process by which the fittest must more and more dwindle away and the less fit survive them, and species be not multiplied but made fewer? Something, perhaps, of the sort may go on in the body in its old age, or in roses in autumn. It must go on in a volunteer army when it is becoming an army of conscripts during a war that is highly lethal. IV The fall of the leaf had brought, too, a sad shortage of heroes--of highly-placed ones, for, of course, every company had its own, authenticated beyond any proof that crosses or medals could give. A few very old Regular privates would say, "Ah! if we had Buller here!" Sir Redvers Buller has always remained, in lofty disregard of conclusive disproof, the Cæsar or Hannibal of the old Regular private, who sets little store by such heroes of Whitehall and Fleet Street as Roberts and Kitchener. But the chiefs of to-day left men cold, at the best. The name of at least one was a by-word. Haig was a name and no more, though a name immune in a mysterious degree from the general scoffing surmise about the demerits of higher commands. Few subalterns or men had seen him. No one knew what he was doing or leaving undone. But some power, not ourselves, making for charity, seemed to recommend him to mercy in everyone's judgement; as if, from wherever he was, nameless waves of some sort rippled out through an uncharted ether, conveying some virtue exhaled by that winning incarnation of honour, courage, and kindness who, seen and heard in the flesh, made you wish to find in him all other excellent qualities too. The front line gave him all the benefit of every doubt. God only knew, it said, whether he or somebody else would have to answer for Bullecourt and Serre. It might not be he who had left the door lying open, unentered, for two nights and days, when the lions had won the battle of Arras that spring, and the asses had let the