Next morning we were marched down into a train for Metz. All the German officers from the camp and a considerable number of civilians came to see us off. As I leant out of the window, to catch a last glimpse of the cathedral, it was hardly possible to realise that the war was over and that we were going home. It was the day to which we had looked forward for so long, the day of which we had dreamt so much during the cold and loneliness of the nights in France. It had been then immeasurably remote, a flickering uncertain gleam, too far away for any tangible hope. And the mind had fastened upon those nearer probabilities of leave,--a blighty, or a course behind the line. And now that day had really come, I could not grasp its significance. I was almost afraid to look forward, and my mind went back to the earlier days of our captivity, to the hunger and the depression, to the intolerable tedium and irritation. And yet, for all that, a wave of sentimentality partially obscured the sharpness of those memories. We had had some good times there in the citadel; that grey monochrome had not been entirely unrelieved. There had been certain moments worth remembering; and I thought that, when the incidents of the past four years had settled down into their true perspective, I should be able to look back, not without a certain kindliness, towards that unnatural life, that strange world of substitute and sauerkraut. § 2 The journey home was protracted by innumerable delays. We left Mainz on November 24th, and it was not until the 5th of December that we arrived in London. We spent five days in Nancy, another three in Boulogne, and the trains behaved as is their wont on the railroads of France. All this rather tended to dispel the glamour of the return. For one of the chief attractions of leave is its suddenness. One is sitting on the steps of a dugout musing gloomily on the probable chance of a relief, when a runner arrives from Battalion with a chit, “You will proceed on U.K. leave to-night. The train leaves Arras at 8.10 p.m.” And then the world is suddenly haloed with flame. One rushes down the dugout, flings hurried orders to the sergeant, collects all that is least important in one’s kit, scatters an extravagance of largess among the batmen who have collected it, and then races for H.Q. It is all a scramble and a rush. The mess cart is chartered, within a couple of hours one is at the railhead; a night of cramp and discomfort and one is at Boulogne; there is just time for a bath at the E.F.C. Club, and then the boat sails. There is a train waiting at the other end, and the whole business takes only twenty-four hours. It is like a tale from the _Arabian Nights_. At one moment one is sitting on a firestep, the next one is in London. It embodies the very essence of romance.