He raised his hands with unaccustomed nervousness. “It is a formal order from the Government!” He would not listen to her tale of billeting money unpaid, and government fertilizer not delivered: “There are other things to do at this moment,” was all he would say. For once Madeleine did not get her way. That impressed her. The next day the horizon to the south and east was black with pillars of smoke. By night these became pillars of flame, biblical, ominous. The incessant sounds of battle changed in timbre. The heavy bombardment ceased. Nearer and nearer crept the rattle of machine guns. Madeleine had one or two errands, and returning by the village shortly afterwards, was astonished to find all the shops shut. Vanhove, the butcher, was loading his best brass bedstead and mattress on to--what of all conceivable vehicles? Madeleine stared before she took it in. It was the roller, the road roller. None other. The well-known road roller the English had installed. Built by Aveling & Porter at Rochester in the ’eighties, it had ground and panted its unwieldy frame northward through many a township and village of England, passing from hand to ever poorer hand, as it deteriorated, until finally the obscure and almost penniless Rural District Council of Marsham and Little Uttersfield, failing to sell it, had painted their name on its boiler and kept it. Unloaded, like so many other derelicts, into the arms of the British Expeditionary Force in the glad enthusiasm of 1915, it had served the turn of an intelligent English Engineer, who, early in the war, had discovered that roads and railways, food and patience alone could win in such a struggle. He had soon been shipped off to the East, lest he bring shame upon his betters, but his roller had remained for years now, on that section of the Joint Road Control of the Second English Army, with the French Ponts et Chaussées Authority, who divided acrimoniously between them the control of the Hazebrouck sub-area. The machine had become a portent in Hondebecq. The children had swung behind it, horses ceased to shy at it, and Madeleine herself had come, in time, to have something almost like affection for it, as a monument of the queer, wayward genius of the English. No such rollers ever rolled the roads of France, but Madeleine had found it useful for both rolling and traction. She had made friends with the two middle-aged, sooty-khakied Derbyshire men who lived with it and got them to do jobs for her. Now she laid a hand gingerly on the warm shining rail of the “cab” and asked of the driver. “What are you doing!” “Got to go, Mamzelle, partee, you know!” “You like a ride, miss? Get up and we’ll take you as far as St. Omer!” his mate added. “Alleman’s coming, you know!” Something fierce prompted Madeleine to say: “I’m not going to run away!” But Vanhove, having hoisted his bedstead into the tender, was persuading the men to drive on.