Riff is within an easy walk of Boulge, where Fitzgerald lies under his little Persian rose tree, covered in summer with tiny yellow roses. You see how central Riff is. And, if you cross the Deben, and walk steadily up the low hill to that broomy, gorsy, breezy upland, Bromswell Heath, then you stand on the very spot where, a little over a hundred years ago, British troops were encamped to await Napoleon. And a few years ago our soldiers assembled there once more to resist the invasion which Kitchener at any rate expected, and which it now seems evident Germany intended. * * * * * We in Riff learned the meaning of war early in the day. Which of us will forget the first Zeppelin raid, and later on the sight of torn, desolated Woodbridge the day after it was bombed: the terrified blanched faces peeping out from the burst doorways, the broken smoking buildings, the high piles of shredded matchwood that had been houses yesterday, the blank incredulous faces of friends and neighbours. No doubt our faces were as incredulous as those we saw around us. It seemed as if it could not, could not be! We had seen photographs of similar havoc in Belgium and France, but Woodbridge! our own Woodbridge, that pleasant shopping town on its tidal river with the wild swans on it. _It could not be!_ But so it was. Yes, the war reached us early, and it left us late. Riff suffered as every other village in Great Britain suffered. Our ruddy cheerful lads went out one after another. Twenty-two came back no more. As the years passed we became inured to raids. Nevertheless, just as we remember the first, so all of us at Riff remember the last in the small hours of Sunday morning, June 17th, 1917. I was awakened as often before, by what seemed at first a distant thunderstorm, at about 3 o'clock in the morning. I got up and went downstairs in the dark. By this time the bombs were falling nearer and nearer. As I felt my way down the narrow staircase it seemed as if the trembling walls were no stronger than paper. The cottage shook and shook as in a palsy, and C. and E. and I took refuge in the garden. M. kept watch in the lane. It was, as far as I could see, pitch dark, but their younger eyes descried, though mine did not, the wounded Zeppelin lumber heavily over us inland, throwing out its bombs. Our ears were deafened by the sharp rat-tat-tat of the machine guns, and by our own frantic anti-aircraft fire. In that pandemonium we stood, how long I know not, unaware that a neighbour's garden was being liberally plastered by our own shrapnel. Then, for the second time, the stricken airship blundered over us, this time in the direction of the sea. When it had passed overhead we groped our way through the cottage, and came out on its eastern side. A mild light met our eyes. The dawn was at hand. It trembled, flushed and stainless as the heart of a wild rose, behind the black clustered roofs of the village, and the low church tower.