Remember all this to the daily accompaniment of those huge shrieking headlines, the trotting of innumerable iron-shod hoofs, the ceaseless rolling of iron-shod wheels, the clatter and vibration of huge motor-lorries, vans, and waggons commandeered for the use of the Auxiliary Transport (brilliantly painted in thousands of instances, and proclaiming in foot-long capitals the virtues of Crump’s Curative Saline, or Bango’s Extract of Beef), mingled with the steady tramp of marching men, all through the days and nights. By night you lay and listened to these sounds, mingled with the bleating of flocks of sheep, and the bellowing of herds of cattle, until the hoofs and wheels and marching boots mingled into the roar of one great ink-black, awful River, whose ice-cold woe-waters—sprung from some mysterious source—swept through our villages and towns and cities, carrying with them millions of lives, brute and human, towards the blood-red dawn of Death. *CHAPTER LIII* *FRANKY GOES TO THE FRONT!* With the First Infantry Brigade of the First British Expeditionary Force went the First Battalion of the Bearskins Plain. Exchanging with Ackroyd, "too sick a man for fighting" (who parted with several superfluous inches of appendix and convalesced in time to go out with the Second Battalion and meet a glorious end at Ypres), Franky was swallowed up in the vortex of Aldershot. 000, Cadogan Place saw him but once more before the roaring flood whirled him away, like a slim brown autumn leaf, to the Unknown. His gift to Margot on the night of their parting was a silver elephant of truculent aspect, having ruby eyes and mother-o’-pearl tusks and a howdah on its back, accommodating a "Gladsome Days" pull-off kalendar. "You’re such nuts on mascots and gadgets, best childie, I thought I’d get you this beggar for a keepsake. Saw it in a shop in Bond Street. It goes like so!"—Franky demonstrated by sticking a penknife-blade under the liberal whack of leaves that had become obsolete since the First of January. "Rather a neat notion. Something appropriate for every day o’ the week," he continued, indicating a rhymed distich appearing beneath the current date. This, the first of many utterances on the part of the Silver Elephant, ranging from the idiotically inappropriate to the appositely malign, ran as follows: "_Be very kind to Pussy-cat_ _And handle her with care:_ _You would not pull her by the tail_ _If her claws grew out of there!_" "Well, if that’s the best this beast can do—" began Margot, sternly surveying the proboscidean. Then she softened, meeting Franky’s disappointed eyes, and said it was a lovely present and she would always keep it on the table by her bedside. She and Franky were almost lovers again for the brief time that yet remained to them. She even endured without open resentment his continual references to the child.