And now the summer had done for the ground what the spring did for the trees. One Sunday, I was to hold a service on ground that was, in the springtime, No Man’s Land. Having ample time I left the dusty road and walked across the broken fields through which our front-line trenches had run. There were innumerable shell holes and I had to pick my way with care through the long grass and lingering barbed wire. I had been over the ground on the day following the advance. Then it was a sea of mud, with vast breakwaters of rusty barbed wire. Now, however, Nature’s healing hand was at work. Slowly but surely the trenches were falling in, and the shell-holes filling up. The lips of the craters and trenches were red as a maiden’s--red with the poppies which come to them. Here and there were large patches of gold and white where unseen hands had sown the mud with dog-daisies. There were other patches all ablaze with the red fire of the poppies, and as the slender plants swayed in the wind, the fire leaped up or died down. When the war broke out I was in "Poppyland" near Cromer, in East Anglia. There I first heard the tramp of armed men on the way to France, and there first caught the strain of "Tipperary"--the farewell song of the First Seven Divisions--a strain I can never hear now without having to stifle back my tears. As I passed by these patches of blood-red poppies I thought of those old and stirring days at Cromer when we watched a regiment of the original Expeditionary Force singing "Tipperary" as it marched swingingly through the narrow streets. The declaration of war was hourly expected and the pier and some of the Sunday-school rooms were given to the soldiers for billets. By morning every soldier had vanished and we could only guess where, but a remark made by one of them to another lingers still. They were standing apart, and watching the fuss the people were making over the regiment. "Yes," he said to his comrade, "they think a great deal of the soldiers in time of war, but they don’t think much of us in days of peace." The remark was so true that it cut like a knife and the wound rankles yet. I have often wondered what became of the lad that went out to France to the horrors of war, with such memories of our attitude towards him in the times of peace. I hope he lived long enough to see our repentance. His memory haunted me among the poppies of Beaurains. In the English Poppyland there was nothing to compare with the red-coated army of poppies now occupying our old front line. In these trenches our gallant men had for nearly three years fought and bled, and it seemed as if every drop of blood poured out by them had turned into a glorious and triumphant poppy.