Voices came up in the hush, clear from the valley, and ceased. A light was lit, like a spark, in a distant window: more stars appeared and the woods were all dark now, and shapes even on the hill slopes began to grow indistinct. Home by a laneway in the dim, still evening a girl was going, singing the Marseillaise. In France where the downs in the north roll away without hedges, as though they were great free giants that man had never confined, as though they were stretching their vast free limbs in the evening, the same light was smiling and glimmering softly away. A road wound over the downs and away round one of their shoulders. A hush lay over them as though the giants slept, or as though they guarded in silence their ancient, wonderful history. The stillness deepened and the dimness of twilight; and just before colours fade, while shapes can still be distinguished, there came by the road a farmer leading his Norman horse. High over the horse’s withers his collar pointed with brass made him fantastic and huge and strange to see in the evening. They moved together through that mellow light towards where unseen among the clustered downs the old French farmer’s house was sheltered away. He was going home at evening humming “God Save the King.” The Punishment An exhalation arose, drawn up by the moon, from an old battlefield after the passing of years. It came out of very old craters and gathered from trenches, smoked up from No Man’s Land, and the ruins of farms; it rose from the rottenness of dead brigades, and lay for half the night over two armies; but at midnight the moon drew it up all into one phantom and it rose and trailed away eastwards. It passed over men in grey that were weary of war; it passed over a land once prosperous, happy and mighty, in which were a people that were gradually starving; it passed by ancient belfries in which there were no bells now; it passed over fear and misery and weeping, and so came to the palace at Potsdam. It was the dead of the night between midnight and dawn, and the palace was very still that the Emperor might sleep, and sentries guarded it who made no noise and relieved others in silence. Yet it was not so easy to sleep. Picture to yourself a murderer who had killed a man. Would you sleep? Picture yourself the man that planned this war! Yes, you sleep, but nightmares come. The phantom entered the chamber. “Come,” it said. The Kaiser leaped up at once as obediently as when he came to attention on parade, years ago, as a subaltern in the Prussian Guard, a man whom no woman or child as yet had ever cursed; he leaped up and followed. They passed the silent sentries; none challenged and none saluted; they were moving swiftly over the town as the felon Gothas go; they came to a cottage in the country. They drifted over a little garden gate, and there in a neat little garden the phantom halted like a wind that has suddenly ceased. “Look,” it said.