0275 Private Scott, H.J., who served his King and country under the strenuous Warburton, disapproved heartily of his officer’s heroic methods. Not that he was a coward, but the War had taken him by surprise when he had just married a charming girl, and, as Captain Gadsby of the Pink Hussars says, "a married man is only half a man." Scott counted the days he spent in the trenches, and this one was the first of ten, and his chief was reckless. The god who guards lovers intervened the next day by the simple means of a scrap of paper asking for a man from the regiment, mechanic by trade, to look after a machine at P—— for disinfecting clothes. P—— was a pretty little town at least eight miles from the front line, rather deserted by the inhabitants on account of _marmites_, but all the same a safe and comfortable retreat for a troglodyte of the trenches. 0275 Private Scott, mechanic by trade, put his name down. His lieutenant abused him; his colonel recommended him; and his general nominated him. An old London omnibus painted a military grey took him away to his new life, far from Warburton and his perils. The machine which Scott had to look after was in the yard of a college, an old building covered with ivy; and Abbé Hoboken, the principal, received him, when he arrived, as if he were a general. "Are you a Catholic, my son?" he asked him in the English of the college. Luckily for Scott, he did not understand, and answered vaguely: "Yes, sir." This involuntary renunciation of the Scotch Presbyterian Church procured him a room belonging to a mobilized Belgian professor and a bed with sheets. Now, at that very moment, Hauptmann Reineker, who commanded a German battery of heavy artillery at Paschendaele, was in a very bad temper. The evening post had brought him an ambiguous letter from his wife in which she mentioned too often, and with an affectation of indifference, a wounded officer of the Guards, whom she had been nursing for several days. During the night, he surveyed his gun-emplacements on the outskirts of a wood, then he said suddenly: "Wolfgang, have you any shells available?" "Yes, sir." "How many?" "Three." "Good! Wake up Theresa’s crew." He then verified his calculations by his map. The men, half awake, loaded the enormous gun. Heineker gave the order, and, shaking up everyone and everything, the shell started forth, hurtling through the night. 0275 Private Scott, then, who adored his wife and had accepted a post without honour for her sake, was sleeping peacefully in the bedroom of a mobilized Belgian professor: and Captain Reineker, whose wife no longer loved him, and whom he mistrusted, was striding furiously up and down amongst the frozen woods; and these two circumstances, widely apart from one another, were developed independently in an indifferent world.