* * * * * It was on the Aisne I took it. Through that ghastly fourteen days we had slogged dully south away from Mons, ever getting nearer Paris. Through the choking dust, with the men staggering as they walked--some asleep, some babbling, some cursing--but always marching, marching, marching; digging at night, only to leave the trenches in two hours and march on again; with ever and anon a battery of horse tearing past at a gallop, with the drivers lolling drunkenly in their saddles, and the guns jolting and swaying behind the straining, sweating horses, to come into action on some ridge still further south, and try to check von Kluck's hordes, if only for a little space. Every bridge in the hands of anxious-faced sapper officers, prepared for demolition one and all, but not to be blown up till all our troops were across. Ticklish work, for should there be a fault, there is not much time to repair it. But at last it was over, and we turned North. A few days later, in the afternoon, my company crossed a pontoon bridge on the Aisne, and two hours afterwards we dug ourselves in a mile and a half beyond it. The next morning, as I was sitting in one of the trenches, there was a sudden, blinding roar--and oblivion. * * * * * I will pass rapidly over the next six weeks--over my journey from the clearing hospital to the base at Havre, of my voyage back to England in a hospital ship, and my ultimate arrival at Drayton Hall, the Delawnays' place in Somerset, where I had gone to convalesce. During the time various fragments of iron were being picked from me and the first shock of the concussion was wearing off, we had handed over our trenches on the Aisne to the French, and moved north to Flanders. Occasional scrawls came through from Jack and Jerry, but the people in England who had any knowledge at all of the fighting and of what was going on, grew to dread with an awful dread the sight of the telegraph-boy, and it required an effort of will to look at those prosaic casualty lists in the morning papers. Then suddenly without warning, as such news always does, it came. The War Office, in the shape of a whistling telegraph-boy, regretted to inform Mr. Delawnay that his son, Lieutenant Jack Delawnay of the Royal Downshire Regiment, had been killed in action. Had it been possible during the terrible days after the news came, I would have gone away, but I was still too weak to move; and I like to think that, perhaps, my presence there was some comfort to them, as a sort of connection through the regiment with their dead boy. After the first numbing shock, the old man bore it grandly. "He was all I had," he said to me one day as I lay in bed, "but I give him gladly for his country's sake." He stood looking at the broad fields. "All his," he muttered; "all would have been the dear lad's--and now six inches of soil and a wooden cross, perhaps not that."