Once in a while the men went home on seven days' leave, or four, and then came back again, gloomily, with a curious kind of hatred of England because the people there seemed so callous to their suffering, so utterly without understanding, so “damned cheerful.” They hated the smiling women in the streets. They loathed the old men who said, “If I had six sons I would sacrifice them all in the Sacred Cause.” They desired that profiteers should die by poison-gas. They prayed God to get the Germans to send Zeppelins to England--to make the people know what war meant. Their leave had done them no good at all. From a week-end at home I stood among a number of soldiers who were going back to the front, after one of those leaves. The boat warped away from the pier, the M. T. O. and a small group of officers, detectives, and Red Cross men disappeared behind an empty train, and the “revenants” on deck stared back at the cliffs of England across a widening strip of sea. “Back to the bloody old trenches,” said a voice, and the words ended with a hard laugh. They were spoken by a young officer of the Guards, whom I had seen on the platform of Victoria saying good-by to a pretty woman, who had put her hand on his shoulder for a moment, and said, “Do be careful, Desmond, for my sake!” Afterward he had sat in the corner of his carriage, staring with a fixed gaze at the rushing countryside, but seeing nothing of it, perhaps, as his thoughts traveled backward. (A few days later he was blown to bits by a bomb--an accident of war.) A little man on deck came up to me and said, in a melancholy way, “You know who I am, don't you, sir?” I hadn't the least idea who he was--this little ginger--haired soldier with a wizened and wistful face. But I saw that he wore the claret-colored ribbon of the V. C. on his khaki tunic. He gave me his name, and said the papers had “done him proud,” and that they had made a lot of him at home--presentations, receptions, speeches, Lord Mayor's addresses, cheering crowds, and all that. He was one of our Heroes, though one couldn't tell it by the look of him. “Now I'm going back to the trenches,” he said, gloomily. “Same old business and one of the crowd again.” He was suffering from the reaction of popular idolatry. He felt hipped because no one made a fuss of him now or bothered about his claret-colored ribbon. The staff-officers, chaplains, brigade majors, regimental officers, and army nurses were more interested in an airship, a silver fish with shining gills and a humming song in its stomach. France... and the beginning of what the little V. C. had called “the same old business.” There was the long fleet of motor-ambulances as a reminder of the ultimate business of all those young men in khaki whom I had seen drilling in the Embankment gardens and shouldering their way down the Strand.