“All that, thank God, is finished now,” said the man. “The English have delivered us from the Beast!” As he spoke another monstrous shell came overhead, but he took no notice of it, and said, “We are safe now from the enemy’s evil power!” It seemed to me a comparative kind of safety. I had no confidence in it when I sat in the parlour of an old lady who, like Eileen O’Connor in Lille, had been an Irish governess in Courtrai, and who now, living in miserable poverty, sat in a bed-sitting room whose windows and woodwork had been broken by shell-splinters. “Do you mind shutting the door, my dear?” she said. “I can’t bear those nasty bombs.” I realised with a large, experienced knowledge that we might be torn to fragments of flesh, at any moment, by one of those nasty “bombs,” which were really eight-inch shells, but the old lady did not worry, and felt safe when the door was shut. Outside Courtrai, when I left, lay some khaki figures in a mush of blood. They were lads whom I had seen unloading ammunition that morning on the bank of the canal. One had asked me for a light, and said, “What’s all this peace-talk?... Any chance?” A big chance, I had told him. Home for Christmas, certain sure this time. The boy’s eyes had lighted up for a moment, quicker than the match which he held in the cup of his hands. “Jesus! Back for good; eh?” Then the light went out of his eyes as the match flared up. “We’ve heard that tale, a score of times. ‘The Germans are weakening. The Huns ’ave ’ad enough!...’ Newspaper talk. A man would be a mug----” Now the boy lay in the mud, with half his body blown away.... I was glad to get back to Lille for a spell, where there were no dead bodies in the roads. And the Colonel’s news, straight from G.H.Q., which--surely--were not playing up the old false optimism again!--helped one to hope that perhaps in a week or two the last boys of our race, the lucky ones, would be reprieved from that kind of bloody death, which I had seen so often, so long, so heaped up in many fields of France and Flanders, where the flower of our youth was killed. Dr. Small was excited by the hope brought back by Colonel Lavington. He sought me out in my billet, _chez Madame Chéri_, and begged me to take a walk with him. It was a moonlight night, but no double throb of a German air-engine came booming over Lille. He walked at a hard pace, with the collar of his “British warm” tucked up to his ears, and talked in a queer disjointed monologue, emotionally, whimsically. I remember some of his words, more or less--anyhow the gist of his thoughts. “I’m not worrying any more about how the war will end. We’ve won! Remarkable that when one thinks back to the time, less than a year ago, when the best thing seemed a draw. I’m thinking about the future. What’s the world going to be afterwards? That’s my American mind--the next job, so to speak.”