No one knows, to this day, why the Bosche never got to Hondebecq, but they halted a mile short of it. Nothing happened. Anticlimax ruled. War moods of exaltation, begotten of danger, and the vitality that rises to meet it, cannot last. The battle of Bailleul dwindled out in gray, cold spring weather. The trench line stiffened and became as fixed as the old line from the Ypres salient to La Bassée had been, before Messines and Paschendaele. The Bosche tried again and again farther south with no more effect. In the north the reorganized English line held good. The mood which came with this new state of things began to show itself, in civilians and soldiers alike, to be one of steady exasperation. For what did all this endless effort amount to? One lived in a state not comparable to that of Peace, as regards comfort, business, or personal liberty. One side or the other made an offensive. The discomfort increased, the hectic war-time business was dislocated, personal liberty disappeared. But one thing remained--War. Enormously expensive, omnipresent, exasperating. Civilians and soldiers, the latter nearly all unwilling civilians now, felt its exasperation. Madeleine felt it. The Baron felt it. The troops billeted in the château and the farm felt it. The Baron, relieved from his wife’s querulous exactions, Madeleine, set free from dutiful if doubtful belief in her father’s methods of business, found the first Australian troops, if not charming visitors, at least good companions for the work in hand. When it became certain that the enemy could get no farther, they were relieved, first by French troops, then by a Clydeside labor battalion. The Baron found his salle-à-manger filled with officers, who, though not actively ill-behaved, and probably well-meaning, he could see, whether he spoke their language or not, came of no particular family. Madeleine found herself confronted with a set of cooks and quartermasters as businesslike as herself, far more akin to her in methods and outlook than had ever been the original volunteer army of England--who had paid what she asked with shy good humor. The neat walks and formal “bosquets” of the château garden, box-hedged, and decorated with plaster figures of nymphs and cupids, situate amid greenish pools, became pitted with latrines, and scarred with dugouts. The village was beyond bullet range, but a 5.9 shell crashed in the top of the “shot” tower in the yard of the Spanish Farm. But worse than these evils were the continual thefts from the cellar of the château of wine, coal, and mattresses (for half the village had readily obtained leave to store their possessions there). At the farm, Madeleine was amazed to find herself forced to sell beer and butter, at less than cost price, by well-organized “strikes” that threatened to leave her merchandise on her hands.