We emptied his pack and haversack. I have never in all my life seen such a lot of rubbish in the war kit of a soldier. There seemed to be nothing there he would really need; but a curious mixture of strange articles which would fill a fancy bazaar. There were hair-brushes with ebony backs and silver monograms, silk handkerchiefs with fancy borders, a pinky tooth-paste, oozing out of a leaden tube; and crushed between a comb and a pair of silk socks, a large bottle of reddish tooth-wash, sufficient to last him three years; and half of which had leaked through the cork to the destruction of about a dozen silk handkerchiefs, spotted and bordered in fanciful shades. There was a box of cigars, a heavy china pot of massage-cream, a pot of hair-pomade, a leather writing-case, a large ivory-backed mirror, which had lost its usefulness for ever, a bottle of fountain-pen ink, two suits of silk pajamas, one striped with pink and the other blue, a huge bath-towel, a case containing seven razors, one for each day in the week, and a sponge as big as his head. Poor Septimus! in his simplicity and ignorance, for the first time in his life he had packed his own kit. CHAPTER XI DEATH VALLEY MOVING OVER BATTLE-FIELDS. ---- BATTALION, LONDON REGIMENT, IN POSSESSION. THE MYSTERY TRENCH. FALFEMONT FARM The final preparations completed, the first platoon began to move off; other platoons followed at intervals, the column slowly wending its way through the Valley of Death to its mysterious destination. We seemed to be going into the unknown; the air was full of mystery; it was uncanny, unnatural. We were moving over battle-fields. The ground was a mass of shell-holes; progress could only be made by walking in single file along a narrow footpath, which twisted in tortuous persistency between the shell-holes, causing innumerable halts and starts, until the column tailed off into an endless line of shadowy figures. Here and there the men became lost to view in some gun-ridden cavity; whilst there again they appeared silhouetted against the moonlit sky, as man by man they appeared and disappeared from view over a rise in the ground. Those who had fallen in the desperate struggle of the previous week lay yet unburied. Friend and foe alike shared the shelter of the heavens, clutching at the soil of France in the agonies of death. There are times when the sight of death excuses the quivering step and the irrepressible sob from the hearts of those who pass onward to brave a similar fate. The Valley of Death was a silent tomb of the wrath of nations, that long, winding Valley of Death, where the bodies of friend and foe lay side by side, or clutched in a desperate embrace, marked the line where the fury of nations found its expression, like the scar of a devil's vengeance.