Near to my discovery of the heartsease I found some of Colonel Gill's men in charge of a height-finder. They had comfortable enough quarters in a German dugout in which I found, and secured as a prize, a little booklet left behind by its late occupants. It is entitled "Wer da?" ("Who goes there?"), and contains a dozen chapters of a very pious and didactic kind on the duties of a soldier, his oath, his honour, his religion, and so on. The chapter on "Der Kriegsherr und der Eid" is rather pathetic in view of subsequent events. Here is a paragraph from it: "It is thoroughly _altergermanisch_ and entirely in correspondence with the character of the German people to follow a King, who represents the might of God in earthly things ... who is a father to his country and a guide and war-lord to his soldiers. Between this prince and the soldiers there exists the most special and intimate relationship. He is the head and the heart of the Army; it is his shield and his sword. It protects his rights and his sacred person. He cares for it and shares its troubles and dangers." What a cynical comment on this sort of stuff that the precious Kriegsherr ran away from his country and his beloved army a few weeks later! Then, again: "We speak of '_deutscher Treue_.' It is a national heirloom handed down to us from our ancestors.... It shows itself through unbreakable adherence to the oath the soldier has made to his Fürsten und Kriegsherrn!" Presumably this particular oath did not belong to the category of scraps of paper. Ninety-eight pages out of the hundred of which the book consists are devoted to this sort of statement and exhortation. But it is only fair to the reverend author to mention that, on the last two pages, under the heading "_Im Krieg_," he enjoins consideration, as a matter of "_Christliche Liebe_," for the people of the conquered countries, ending by an emphatic warning that the soldiers should think what would happen to their homes if the enemy were not imbued with the same Christian spirit! Unfortunately, this not very exalted motive for decent behaviour did not prove itself sufficiently vigorous to have any effect on the people whose parsons had gloried in the "merriness of war" four years earlier, when they thought that the fighting would be over and their own side victorious in a couple of months. When one passes beside or over miles of No Man's Land, such as looks picturesque enough in Plate 42, one has to remember that one is not seeing a miniature landscape of chalk hills, such as would delight any youngster on Hampstead Heath, but seeing, perhaps, a garden, perhaps a cottage home, an orchard, a piece of green meadow, turned into ruin by the Huns. Surely the ghosts of these inanimate things must haunt, with the ghosts of thousands of innocent men, the people who turned their neighbour's country, animate and inanimate, from a joyful and living reality into wilderness and a graveyard! [Illustration: _PLATE XL._