The other three remained silent, restraining their emotion with difficulty. Aurelle seemed to hear, in the murmuring summer air, the undying strains of "Destiny Waltz" and saw the padre setting out once more on horseback, his pockets bulging with hymn-books and cigarettes for the men. The doctor meditated: "’Where two or three are gathered together, there I will be in the midst of them.’ What a profound and true saying! And how the religion of the dead still lives." "Come," said the general, "we must go, the Boche sausage is up in the air, and we are four; it is too many. They tolerate two, but we must not abuse their courtesy. I am going on up to the trenches. You, Parker, will take Aurelle back, and if you want to go with them, doctor, I will tell your colonel that I have given you leave for the afternoon." The three friends passed slowly across the silent plains, which only a few months before had been the formidable battlefield of the Somme. As far as the eye could see, there were low, undulating hillocks covered with thick, coarse grass, groups of mutilated tree-trunks marking the place of the famous wood, and millions of poppies made these dead fields glow with a warm and coppery light. A few tenacious rose-trees, with lovely fading roses, had remained alive in this wilderness, beneath which slept the dead. Here and there posts, bearing painted notices, like those on a station platform, recalled villages unknown yesterday, but now ranking with those of Marathon or Rivol: Contalmaison, Martinpuich, Thiepval. "I hope," said Aurelle, looking at the innumerable little crosses, here grouped together as in cemeteries, there isolated, "that this ground will be consecrated to the dead who won it, and that this country will be kept as an immense rustic cemetery, where children may come to learn the story of heroes." "What an idea!" said the doctor. "No doubt the graves will be respected; but they will have good crops all round them in two years’ time. The land is too rich to remain widowed; look at that superb lot of cornflowers on those half-healed scars." And truly, a little further on, some of the villages seemed, like convalescents, to be tasting the joy of life once more. Shop windows crowded with English goods in many-coloured packets brightened up the ruined houses. As they passed through a straggling village of Spanish aspect the doctor resumed: "Yes, this is a marvellous land. Every nation in Europe has conquered it in turn; it has defeated its conqueror every time." "If we go a little out of the way," said Parker, "we could visit the battlefield of Crécy; it would interest me. I hope you are not annoyed with us, Aurelle, for having beaten Philippe de Valois? Your military history is too glorious for you to have any resentment for events which took place so long ago." "My oldest resentments do not last six hundred years," said Aurelle. "Crécy was an honourably-contested match; we can shake hands over it."