"For," he concluded, parodying a line from a once popular opera, "’you really must eat somewhere, and it might as well be here.’ Don’t be in a hurry to get to Poperinghe," he continued. "I was over there this afternoon when a German aviator came to call. Just as a preliminary, and in order to show his good faith, he dropped a bomb on the church—Some crash, I tell you. It trimmed one corner off the tower and spattered the door rather badly." "Was any one hurt?" Reggy enquired anxiously. "Not at the moment," Harman replied, "but a few hundred fools, including your humble servant, rushed into the square ’to see what made the wheels go round.’ He hovered over us gracefully for a few moments, waiting to collect a good crowd of spectators, then he dropped a big one right into the centre of the mass." "Good Lord!" Reggy exclaimed in a horrified whisper, "what happened?" "Nothing as bad as we deserved, but there were eleven killed and as many more wounded—it was a horrible sight! You’ll see the effects of it still when you get there, in the broken windows and pieces of stone knocked out of the buildings for fifty yards around." We decided to stay for dinner. We motored down a side street and pulled up at his "Bachelor’s Own." It was a comfortable French house of the better class, with floor of coloured tile and long glass doors connecting all the down-stairs rooms. A piano and a grate-fire, around which a few leather easy chairs were placed, gave the "lounge" an appearance of homelike comfort—moreover, one might sit there and, by merely turning the head, see everything of interest on that floor. We noticed in the next room the table being spread for numerous guests, and a Belgian servant bustling about at his work. Harman motioned us to be seated, and after offering us some cigarettes, told us to "make ourselves at home" as he must warn his butler (save us!) of our arrival. When he returned a few moments later, beaming with smiles, like the true host he proved to be, he remarked deprecatingly: "You mustn’t expect too much of an old bach’s table in these rough war-worn days; but as far as it goes this is open house to every man in uniform." Later in the evening, when guest after guest "dropped in," until there were eighteen of us in all, we grasped the significance of his remark, and realised what his genial hospitality meant to the lonely officers who passed that way.