In the privacy of his thoughts, he thanked goodness that Bel could be trusted not to emulate them; though her attitude towards the war was now less hostile than it had been. The very air she breathed was impregnated with war-fever, war-talk and war-realities. It was increasingly evident that new activities were going to become the fashion; and she was of those who unquestioningly follow a fashion, lead it where it may. Having no taste for the menial work of hospitals or for tending the sick and wounded, she had elected to help in some sort of women’s work engineered by Harry, ‘the Cause’ being temporarily extinct. So far as possible she turned away her eyes from beholding and her heart from feeling the full measure of the invisible horror, which, to more imaginative minds, became too acutely visible and audible during that critical last week of August 1914. For by now, across the Channel, the Great Retreat had begun. Days that, at Wynchcombe Friars, slipped by all too fast, seemed over there, to have neither beginning nor end. Common standards of time were lost in that ceaseless, sleepless nightmare of dogged marching and still more dogged fighting, whenever Prussian hordes gave the broken remnant of an army a chance to turn and smite, as the British soldier can smite even in retreat. It was from Le Cateau that an officer friend sent a pencil scrawl to Mark. ‘It is quite evident that we have taken the knock badly. With any other army one would say we’re beaten. But Tommy doesn’t understand the word. You can only beat him by knocking the life out of him. And even when you think he’s dead, chances are he’ll get up and kick you. People at home simply haven’t begun to know what heroes these chaps are. Makes me sick even to think of certain supercilious folk, I seem to remember, who thought the worst of any man in uniform on principle. Great Scott, they’re not fit to lick Tommy’s boots.’ Mark handed that letter to Bel. ‘There’s one in the eye for your precious Maitland,’ he remarked coolly. ‘Copy it out verbatim, please, and send it to him with my compliments!’ And Bel obeyed with exemplary meekness. She had rather objected to the tone of Maitland’s last letter; and, in her own fashion, she was very much impressed. Heroism, a long way off and entirely unconnected with one’s self, was an admirable thing in man. * * * * * It was near the end of August, when the Channel ports were being evacuated and the fall of Paris seemed merely a matter of days, that Mark at last found his name in the Gazette coupled with that of a distinguished Highland regiment; and in record time he was ready—uniform, equipment, parting presents and all.