At first Marie could only say, “O, my God!” and rock herself. But presently, reviving under the influence of food and drink, and the still more potent surroundings of safety in that familiar, warm old kitchen, where she had grown up, began to tell of the daily increase in shelling and bombing. In her half-empty farm-house, with the glass long gone from its shuttered windows, and the machine-gun bullets in its walls, relics of the first engagement with the Germans in 1914, she had billeted some English Engineers. The sector had been quiet ever since Neuve Chapelle, a year before. Suddenly, as the English sat with her around the fire, the shell had come. It had fallen in the doorway of the farm and had flung half the house upon the soldiers. Marie, protected by the solid brick chimney-piece, as soon as she got her breath, had scrambled under the débris to the room where Emilienne was crying to her. The door was jammed by a fallen beam. Some soldiers had run from a neighboring billet, had broken in the door and got the child out. How they had all tramped up the road, shells ahead, shells behind, shells falling each side, with the sky red and the air rocking with the English artillery retaliation, she could not tell. At last, at a dump of some sort the Engineers had put her on a lorry that had taken her to Strazeele. Farther than that they could not go; it was the limit of their Corps area. Marie and Madeleine had been educated by the past eighteen months, and knew better than to expect a lorry to go outside its Corps area. So Marie had had to walk, with the child in her arms, to Caestre, where she had found, thank God! plenty of lorries running back from railhead. On hearing her tale, an officer had allowed her to get into one that was going to Hondebecq, and she had easily persuaded the driver to go as far as Spanish Farm. At this point there was a tap on the door, which was opened by a khaki-clad figure, with a sheepish face and unmistakable Cockney accent. “Beg parding, mum, but ’ows yer little gal?” “Give them something to take, they had been so----” she used the untranslatable word “gentil,” for which “decent” is perhaps the nearest equivalent. But Marie meant what the word perhaps originally meant--human as against inhuman, civilized as against barbarous. Madeleine took out mugs of coffee and rum, and was rewarded by a cheerful, “Thank ye, kindly, miss, and here’s the very best!” Madeleine came back, stepping softly. Emilienne had sunk into a deep, heavy sleep, interrupted by twitching and muttering, in the chimney corner. Giving her a glance, Madeleine clasped her hands. “O Marie, all your things! The brass bedstead, the beer glasses, the clock!” Marie shook her head, tears ran down her face. Above her, old Jerome, caring little for women’s fallals, muttered: “Thank God, the little one was spared!”