A small number, chiefly from the North or from Ireland, might be Catholics, but also from the north of Ireland was an equal number of violent anti-Catholics, and it was to this latter section that he judged the perpetrator of the outrage to belong. No, they would see nothing, or at best something to despise, in that little memorial altar, hardly more than an enlarged tombstone, in the corner of a Flemish pasture. It was strange if not detestable, it was foreign; they never saw their own gravestones, seldom those of any relative. He sympathized with them in that ultra-English sentimentality, that cannot bear to admit frankly the frail briefness of human life. And so the thing had happened, any of them might have done it, most of them would do it, under similar circumstances. The tail of the last column wound out of B camp, the N.C.O. he took with him on these occasions was reporting all clear, and might he hand over to the advance party of the incoming Division. Dormer gave him exact orders as to what to hand over and obtain a signature for, and where to find him next, for he did not believe in allowing an N.C.O. any scope for imagination, if by any possibility such a faculty might have survived in him. The weather had broken, and he jogged along in the mud to C camp and found it already vacated, but no advance party ready to take over, and resigned himself to the usual wait. He waited and he waited. Of course, he wasn’t absolutely forced to do so. He might have left his N.C.O. and party to hand over. He might have cleared them off and left the incoming Division to shift for itself. That had been done many a time in his experience. How often, as a platoon commander, had he marched and marched, glancing over his shoulder at tired men only too ready to drop out, marched and marched until at length by map square and horse sense, and general oh-let’s-get-in-here-and-keep-any-one-else-out, he had found such a camp, a few tents subsiding in the mud, a desolate hut or two, abandoned and unswept, places which disgusted him more than any mere trench or dug-out, because they were places that people had lived in and left unclean. He had never experienced such a thing before he came into the army. His nice middle-class upbringing had never allowed him to suspect that such places existed. And now that he was Captain Dormer, attached H.Q. Nth Division, he endeavoured to see that they did not. So he hung about intending to see the thing done properly. He got no encouragement. He knew that when he got back to the Division Colonel Birchin would simply find him something else to do, and the fact that no complaints followed them, and that the incoming Division had a better time than they would otherwise have had, would be swallowed up in the hasty expedience of the War. Still, he did it, because he liked to feel that the job was being properly done. To this he had been brought up, and he was not going to change in war-time.