“Who are you?” he asked, in a more natural voice, and when we explained he laughed gruffly. “I never saw two strangers pass this way before!” He was an old soldier, “back to the army again,” with Kitchener's men. He had been in the Chitral campaign and South Africa--“Little wars compared to this,” as he said. A fine, simple man, and although a bricklayer's laborer in private life, with a knowledge of the right word. I was struck when he said that the German flares were more “luminous” than ours. I could hardly see his face in the darkness, except when he struck a match once, but his figure was black against the illumined sky, and I watched the motion of his arm as he pointed to the roads up which his comrades had gone to the support of another battalion at Hooge, who were hard pressed. “They went along under a lot of shrapnel and had many casualties.” He told the story of that night in a quiet, thoughtful way, with phrases of almost biblical beauty in their simple truth, and the soul of the man, the spirit of the whole army in which he was a private soldier, was revealed when he flashed out a sentence with his one note of fire, “But the enemy lost more than we did, sir, that night!” We wandered away again into the darkness, with the din of the bombardment all about us. There was not a square yard of ground unplowed by shells and we did not nourish any false illusions as to finding a safe spot for a bivouac. There was no spot within the ramparts of Ypres where a man might say “No shells will fall here.” But one place we found where there seemed some reasonable odds of safety. There also, if sleep assailed us, we might curl up in an abandoned dugout and hope that it would not be “crumped” before the dawn. There were several of these shelters there, but, peering into them by the light of a match, I shuddered at the idea of lying in one of them. They had been long out of use and there was a foul look about the damp bedding and rugs which had been left to rot there. They were inhabited already by half-wild cats--the abandoned cats of Ypres, which hunted mice through the ruins of their old houses--and they spat at me and glared with green-eyed fear as I thrust a match into their lairs. There were two kitchen chairs, with a deal table on which we put our cake and Cointreau, and here, through half a night, my friend and I sat watching and listening to that weird scene upon which the old moon looked down; and, as two men will at such a time, we talked over all the problems of life and death and the meaning of man's heritage. Another sentry challenged us--all his nerves jangled at our apparition. He was a young fellow, one of “Kitchener's crowd,” and told us frankly that he had the “jimjams” in this solitude of Ypres and “saw Germans” every time a rat jumped. He lingered near us--“for company.