_Somewhere in Belgium, Sunday._ Sunday again, but hardly to be imagined in these troublous times and places, with adventure for one’s bedfellow, war for one’s profession, and bloodshed and horrors for one’s constant reflection. Despite all this there exists, and must always exist in every war that peculiar intermingling, that strange blend of horror and sentiment, hate and romance, that mixture of dross and gold. The feelings and actions that bring out all that is the most savage, the most primitive in man’s nature, at the same time endowing him with the tenderness and unselfishness of a woman, the courage of a hero, and the fortitude and forbearance of a saint. Romance! I have a most charming instance to give to you my dear M----. We met him first in December, 1914, in the little old-world town of S----. In fact I had the good fortune to be billeted upon him. The better class, or rather all those inhabitants who could afford it, had fled from the town at the first advance of the Hun hordes. But he had elected to risk his neck, and stay to comfort, and if possible to protect, the women and children. He was a queer old character was Père Dreyfus; he had lived in the little town now thirty years, since he came there first as a stripling curate. His curling brown hair had turned to an austere gray, his cheeks were hollow and shrunken, and his old back was bent almost double with shouldering other people’s burdens. By the general population he was almost idolized, men, women and even small children brought their troubles to Père Dreyfus, and they never went away without receiving the closest attention, and the warmest sympathy. As they loved and idolized him, so he reciprocated their feelings, and never tired of talking of them, in the long dark evenings, when we had the pleasure of sharing his company over a glass of old port, with Monsieur le Maire. He would relate vividly and with force, how in the great advance, the Uhlan patrols had ridden into the town, camped there for thirty-six hours, then returned the way they had come without, strange to say, molesting any of the population. But there was one thing that Père Dreyfus did not believe in, and that was the air. “Bah,” he was wont to say, with a contemptuous snap of his bony fingers; “mere playthings, toys, those air-machines, toys that will be shot down before they have been in the air for half-an-hour on end.” He had incidentally never seen an aeroplane in flight, and little did he guess how those mere playthings were to affect his own life.