It was a slumbrous afternoon in September. My wound had healed up a month ago, and I was lazily convalescent at my aunt’s house in one of the most beautiful parts of Kent. The six soldiers who were also convalescent there were down in the hop-garden. For hop-picking was in full swing. I was sitting in a deck-chair with _Don Quixote_ on my knees; but I was not reading. I had apparently broken the offensive power of the army of midges by making a brilliant counter-attack with a pipe of Chairman. The sun blazed mercilessly on the croquet-lawn; the balls were lying all together round one hoop: for there was a golf-croquet tournament in progress, and the mallets stood about against various hoops; one very tidy and proper mallet was standing primly in the stand at one corner. My chair was well sited under the cool shade of a large mulberry tree, in whose thick lofty branches the wind rustled with a delicious little sigh; sometimes a regular little gust would send the boughs swishing, and then a little rain of red and white mulberries would plop on to the grass, and strike the summer-house roof with a smart patter. On the grass-bank at the side of the lawn, by a blazing border of orange and red nasturtiums, a black cat was squatting with tail slowly waving to and fro, watching a fine large tabby that was sniffing at the nasturtiums in a nonchalant manner. They were the best of friends, playing that most interesting of all games, war. I was not reading: I was listening to the incessant murmur that came from far away across the Medway, across the garden of England, and across the Channel and the flats of Flanders. That sound came from Picardy. All day the insistent throb had been in the air; sometimes faint bumps were clearly distinguishable, at other times it was nothing but one steady vibration. But always it was there, that distant growl, that insistent mutter. Even in this perfect peace, I could not escape the War. To-day I felt completely well; the lassitude and inertness of convalescence were gone--at any rate, for the moment. My mind was very clear, and I could think surely and rapidly. The cats reminded me of the lusty family that lived in the cellar in the Cuinchy trenches, and the murmur of the guns drew my thoughts across the Channel. I tried to imagine trenches running across the lawn, with communication trenches running back to a support line through the meadow; a few feet of brick wall would be all that would be left of the house, and this would conceal my snipers; the mulberry tree would long ago have been razed to the ground, and every scrap of it used as firewood in our dug-outs; this deck chair of mine might possibly be in use in Company Headquarters in one of the cellars. No, it was not easy to imagine war without seeing it.