civilians from Lille, Valenciennes, and other towns, who had been taken away by the Germans for forced labour behind the lines. Two days ago the Germans had said, “We’ve no more use for you. Get back to your own people. The war is over.” They looked worn and haggard, like men who had been shipwrecked. Some of the boys were weak, and sat down on the roadside with their bundles, and could go no farther. Others trudged on gamely, with crooks which they had cut from the hedges, and only stopped to cry “_Vivent les Anglais!_” as our soldiers passed. I looked into many of their faces, remembering the photograph of Edouard Chéri which had been given to me by his mother. Perhaps he was somewhere in those troops of homing exiles. But he might have been any one of those lanky boys in ragged jackets and broken boots, and cloth caps pulled down over the ears. Just outside Mons, at one minute to eleven o’clock, there was a little desultory firing. Then, a bugle blew, somewhere in a distant field, one long note. It was the “Cease Fire!” A cheer coming faintly over the fields followed the bugle-call. Then there was no other sound where I stood but the scrunching of wheels of gun-limbers and transport-wagons, the squelch of mud in which horses and mules trudged, and the hard breathing of tired men marching by under their packs. So, with a curious lack of drama, the Great Adventure ended! That bugle had blown the “Cease Fire!” of a strife which had filled the world with agony and massacre; destroyed millions of men; broken millions of lives; ruined many great cities and thousands of hamlets, and left a long wide belt of country across Europe where no tree remained alive and all the earth was ravaged; crowded the world with maimed men, blind men, mad men, diseased men; flung Empires into anarchy, where hunger killed the children and women had no milk to feed their babes; and bequeathed to all fighting nations a heritage of debt beneath which many would stagger and fall. It was the “Cease Fire!” of all that reign of death, but sounded very faintly across the fields of France.