And so back, as the diarists say, by the grassless and blasted route over which I had come. After I was in the car I heard one of the wicked screams with its unpleasant premonition, which came to an end by whipping out a ball of angry black smoke short of a near-by howitzer, which was the last shell-burst that I saw. Good-bye, too, to my English comrades in a group at the doorway: to Robinson with his poise, his mellowness, his wisdom, his well-balanced sentences, who had seen the world around from mining camps of the west to Serbian refugee camps; to "our Gibbs," ever sweet-tempered, writing his heart out every night in the human wonder of all he saw in burning sentences that came crowding to his pencil-point which raced on till he was exhausted, though he always revived at dinner to undertake any controversy on behalf of a better future for the whole human race; to blithesome Thomas who will never grow up, making words dance a tune, quoting Horace in order to forget the shells, all himself with his coat off and swinging a peasant's scythe; to Philips the urbane, not saying much but coming to the essential point, our scout and cartographer, who knew all the places on the map between the Somme and the Rhine and heard the call of Pittsburgh; to Russell, that pragmatic, upstanding expert in squadrons and barrages, who saved all our faces as reporters by knowing news when he saw it, arbiter of mess conversations, whose pungent wit had a movable zero--luck to them all! May Robinson have a stately mansion on the Thames where he can study nature at leisure; Gibbs never want for something to write about; Thomas have six crops of hay a year to mow and a garden with a different kind of bird nesting in every tree; Philips a new pipe every day and a private yacht sailing on an ocean of maps; Russell a home by the sea where he can watch the ships come in--when the war is over. It happened that High Visibility had slightly the upper hand over his gloomy brother the day they bade me _bon voyage_. My last glimpse of the cathedral showed it clear against the sky; and ahead many miles of rich, familiar landscape of Picardy and Artois were to unfold before I took the cross-channel steamer. I knew that I had felt the epic touch of great events. THE END End of Project Gutenberg's My Second Year of the War, by Frederick Palmer