“Well I’m glad there was no mystery,” smiled Pat. “I don’t want any ghosts at Sunflowers.” But Francis Gordon, whose writer’s brain could summon and set aside both real and imaginative pictures at will, sat very silent, visioning in pale gold against the dark panelling of his new home the head of a girl in America—a girl whose last letter had concluded: “Somehow or other I don’t think I shall ever get married.” PART TWENTY-THREE “BEER” BATTERY § 1 If this were a “war-book,” at least two chapters might here be devoted to the months which the Fourth Southdown Brigade spent in and around Neuve Eglise. But since we are only considering war as it affected the fortunes of our Mr. Jameson, his wife Patricia, and a few other individuals, the reader at this point—as once before, in the City of Fear—is asked to use his or her imagination. Suffices, that the war went on. In England, goaded by a strong Press, vacillating politicians introduced their weakling Conscription Act with a brave fanfare of trumpets; a few perverts developed a “conscience” which did not prevent their eating food brought to them at the risk of human life; the bulk of the nation, humping its pack with a shrug, were much consoled by the official announcement of the Jutland Victory as a defeat. In the firing-line, the Huns hammered vainly at Verdun, the British and French prepared counter-attack on the Somme. But Peter Jameson, Cigar Merchant, cared for none of these things. He had reached that particular point in the soldier’s existence which is only described by the French word “_cafard_” or its Anglo-Saxon equivalent “fed-up.” How much the mental, how much the physical contributed to this “_cafard_” of our Mr. Jameson—are questions for the psychologist. Remain the facts that he was bored, irritable, depressed—and more intolerably efficient in the routine duties of his Adjutancy than ever. Only two thoughts consoled: one personal, “I’ve made such a muck of things at home that perhaps the front is the best place for me”: and the other, “Besides, if anything _does_ happen—Pat and the kids will get that insurance money.” His home letters, of course, continued to depict the Brigade as a permanent poker-school established some leagues behind the firing-line! § 2