If Jan had probed and analysed the serenity of spirit which he strove to define, he might have discovered that it arose simply from a sense that he was doing his duty; but he never quite arrived at that conclusion. What he did conclude—and found humorously puzzling—was that the place into which he had dropped was the right place for him, that he must always have been meant to be a soldier, not a poet nor an imaginative writer nor any of the fine things that he would have liked to be, but just a private in an infantry regiment. Well, even so, ambition need not be banished, and his chance of earning what Miss Mildred had said would make her proud might come any day. He did, as the weeks slipped on, obtain sundry occasions of proving himself a capable fighter; but the affairs in which he was concerned were not important enough for public record. Save for these sporadic attacks upon the enemy, which for the most part resulted only in the loss of a considerable number of lives, there was no break in the regular routine of so many days in the trenches, followed by a period of rest in billets, whence he despatched his letters, writing them invariably with the pencil which was his most treasured possession. It was on a cold, frosty night in spring that two staff officers, passing along his trench, halted beside him, and one of them called out: ‘Hullo!—hanged if it isn’t John Issel! Well, Jan, ’tis a wisht poor job sodgerin’, sure enough. Bain’t it now?’ Jan, standing at the salute, had a broad smile for the handsome young fellow who accosted him in the dialect of which he had lately been endeavouring to rid himself. He did not know much of Captain Haseldine, but he was proud and pleased to be recognised, and he made reply that he had nothing to complain about. Campaigning, he added, was teaching him a lot of new things. ‘Oh, it’s doing that for most of us,’ Frank Haseldine observed, laughing. ‘Even for some of our Generals.’ He went on talking for a few minutes about home affairs, remarking in an explanatory parenthesis to his companion, ‘Issel comes from our parish.’ Then he said to Jan ‘You’ll see Captain Bernard again one of these days, I hope, if we all pull through. Captain Bernard is engaged to be married to my sister Mildred.’