VIII

MAY MARGARET

May Margaret was an American girl, married to a lieutenant in the British Army named Brian Davidson. When the regretful telegram from the War Office, announcing his death in action, was delivered to her in her London apartment, she read it without a quiver, crumpled it up, threw it into the fire, and leaned her head against her arm, under his photograph on the mantel-piece. When her heart began to beat again, she went to her bedroom and locked the door. This was not the Anglo-American love-affair of fiction. Both of them were poverty-stricken in the estimation of their friends; and it was only by having her black evening dress "done over," and practising other strict economies for a whole year, that May Margaret had been able to sail from New York to work in an European hospital. The marriage had taken place a little more than three months ago, while Davidson was home on a few days' leave.

After the announcement of his death, she did not emerge from her room until the usual letter arrived from the front, explaining with the usual helplessness of the brother officer, that Davidson was really "one of the best," that "everybody liked him," and that "he was the life and soul of his company." But the letter contained one thing that she was not expecting, an official photograph of the grave, a quarter-plate picture of an oblong of loose earth, marked with a little cross made, apparently, of two sticks of kindling wood. And it was this that had brought her back to life again. It was so strangely matter-of-fact, so small, so complete, that it brought her out of the great dark spaces of her grief. It reminded her of something that Davidson had once written in a letter from the trenches. "Things out here are not nearly so bad as people at home imagine. At home, one pictures the war as a great blaze of horror. Out here, things become more sharply defined, as the lights of a city open up when you approach them, or as the Milky Way splits itself up into points of light under the telescope. I have never seen a dead body yet that looked more imposing than a suit of old clothes. The real man was somewhere else."

She examined the photograph with a kind of curiosity. In this new sense of the reality of death, the rattle of the traffic outside had grown strange and dreamlike, and the rattle of the tea-things and the smell of the buttered toast which an assiduous, but discreet landlady placed at her side, seemed as fantastic and remote as any fairy-tale. All the trivial details of the life around her had assumed a new and mysterious quality. She seemed to be moving in a phantasmagorical world. The round red face of the landlady came and went like the goblin things you may see over your shoulder in a looking-glass at twilight. And the center of all this insubstantial dream-stuff was that one vivid oblong of loose earth, marked with two sticks of kindling wood, in the neat and sharply defined official photograph.

There was something that looked like a black thread entwining the arms of the tiny cross; and she puzzled over it stupidly, wondering what it could be. "I suppose I could write and ask," she said to herself. Then an over-mastering desire seized her. She must go and see it. She must go and see the one fragment of the earth that remained to her, if only for the reason that there, perhaps, she might find the relief of tears. But she had another reason also, a reason that she would never formulate, even to herself, an over-mastering impulse from the depths of her being.

May Margaret had no intimate friends in London. She had established herself in these London lodgings with the cosmopolitan independence of the American girl, whose own country contains distances as great as that from London to Petrograd. The world shrinks a little when your own country is a continent; and it was with no sense of remoteness that she now went to the telephone and rang up the London office of the Chicago Bulletin.

"I want to speak to Mr. Harvey," she said. "Is this Mr. Harvey? This is Mrs. Davidson,—Margaret Grant—you remember, don't you? I want to see you about something very important. You are sending people out to the front all the time, aren't you, in connection with your newspapers? Well, I want to know if you can arrange for me to go.... Yes, as a woman correspondent.... Oh, they don't allow it? Not at the British front?... Well, I've got to arrange it somehow.... Won't you come and see me and talk it over?... All right, at six-thirty. Good-by."

The official photograph was still in her hand when Mr. William K. Harvey, of the Chicago Bulletin, was announced. He was a very young man to be managing the London office of a great newspaper, but this was not a disadvantage for May Margaret's purpose.

"So you want to go to the front," he said, settling down into the arm-chair on the other side of the fire. "It would certainly make a great story. We ought to be able to syndicate it all through the Middle West; but you'll have to give up the idea of the British front. We might manage the French front, I think."

"But I want particularly to go to Arras. Surely, you can manage it, Mr. Harvey. You must know all sorts of influential people here." Her voice, with its husky contralto notes, rather like those of a boy whose voice has lately broken, had always an appeal for Mr. Harvey, and it was particularly pleasing just then. He beamed through his glasses and ran his hand through his curly hair.

"I was talking to Sir William Robertson about a very similar proposition only yesterday, and Sir William told me that he'd do anything on earth for the Chicago Bulletin, but the War Office, which is in heaven, had decided finally to allow no women correspondents at the British front."

May Margaret rose and went to the window. For a moment she pressed her brow against the cool glass and, as she stared hopelessly at the busses rumbling by, an idea came to her. She wondered that she had not thought of it before.

"Come here, Mr. Harvey," she said. "I want to show you something."

He joined her at the window. A bus had halted by the opposite pavement. The conductor was swinging lightly down by the hand-rail, a very youthful looking conductor, in breeches and leggings.

"Is that a man or a woman?" said May Margaret.

"A woman, isn't it?"

"And that?" She pointed to another figure striding by in blue overalls and a slouch hat.

"I don't know. There are so many of them about now, that on general principles, I guess it's a woman. Besides, it looks as if it would be in the army if it were not a woman."

"Yes, but I am an American correspondent," said May Margaret.

"Gee!" said Mr. Harvey, surveying her from head to foot. His face looked as if all the printing presses of the Chicago Bulletin were silently at work behind it. She was tall and lean—a college friend had described her exactly as "half goddess and half gawk." Her face was of the open-air type. Her hair would have to be cropped, of course. "Gee!" he said again. "It would be the biggest scoop of the war."

A fortnight later, a slender youth in khaki-colored clothes, with leggings, arrived at the Foreign Office, presented a paper to a sad-eyed messenger in the great hall, and was led to the disreputable old lift which, as usual, bore a notice to the effect that it was not working to-day. The sad-eyed messenger heaved the usual sigh, and led the way up three flights of broad stone stairs to a very dark waiting-room. There were three other young men in the room, but it was almost impossible to see their faces.

"Mr. Grant, of the Tribune, wasn't it, sir?" said the messenger.

"Mr. Martin Grant, of the Chicago Bulletin," said May Margaret, and the messenger shuffled into the distance along a gloomy corridor which seemed to be older than any tomb of the Pharaohs, and destined to last as long again.

In a few minutes, a young Englishman, who looked like an army officer in mufti, but was really a clerk in the Foreign Office, named Julian Sinclair, was making himself very charming to the four correspondents. To one of them he talked very fluently in Spanish: to another he spoke excellent Swedish, bridging several moments of misunderstanding with smiles and gestures that would have done credit to a Macchiavelli; to the third, because he was a Greek, he spoke French; and to Martin Grant, because he was an American, he spoke the language of George Washington, and behaved as if he were a fellow-countryman of slightly different, possibly more broad-minded, but certainly erroneous politics.

Then he gave them all a few simple directions. He was going to have the pleasure of escorting them to the front. It was necessary that they should be accompanied by some one from the Foreign Office, he explained, in order to save them trouble; and they had been asked to meet him there to-day for purposes of identification and to get their passports. These would have to be stamped by both the British and French military authorities at an address which he gave them, and they would please meet him at Charing Cross Station at twelve o'clock to-morrow morning. It was all very simple, and Mr. Martin Grant felt greatly relieved.

There was a drizzle of rain the next morning, for which May Margaret was grateful. It was a good excuse for appearing at the station in the Burberry raincoat, which gave her not only a respite from self-consciousness, but an almost military air. Her cloth cap, too, the peak of which filled her strong young face with masculine shadows, approximated to the military shape. It was a wise choice; for the soft slouch hat, which she had tried at first, had persistently assumed a feminine aspect, an almost absurdly picturesque effect, no matter how she twisted it or pulled it down on her close-cropped head.

She was the first of the party to arrive, and when Julian Sinclair hurried along the platform with the three foreign correspondents, there was no time left for conversation before they were locked in their compartment of the military train. They were the only civilians aboard.

She dropped into a corner seat with her newspaper. But her eyes and brain were busy with the scene outside. The train was crammed with troops, just as it had been on that other day when she stood outside on the platform, like those other women there, and said good-by to Brian. She was living it all over again, as she watched those farewells; but she felt nearer to him now, as if she were seeing things from his own side, almost as if she had broken through the barriers and taken some dream-train to the next world, in order to follow him.

There was a very young soldier leaning from the window of the next compartment. He was talking to a girl with a baby in her arms. Her wide eyes were fixed on his face with the same solemn expression as those of the child, dark innocent eyes with the haunted beauty of a Madonna. They were trying to say something to each other, but the moment had made them strangers, and they could not find the words.

"You'll write," she said faintly.

He nodded and smiled airily. A whistle blew. There was a banging of doors, and a roar of cheering. The little mother moved impulsively forward, climbed on to the footboard, threw her right arm around the neck of her soldier, and drew his face down to her own.

"Stand back there," bellowed the porters. But the girl's arm was locked round the lad's neck as if she were drowning, and they took no notice. The train began to move. A crippled soldier, in blue hospital uniform and red tie, hobbled forward on his crutch, and took hold of the girl.

"Break away," he said gruffly. "Break away, lass."

He pulled her back to the platform. Then he hobbled forward with the moving train and spoke to the young soldier.

"If you meet the blighter wot gave me this," he said, pointing to his amputated thigh, "you give 'im 'ell for me!"

It was a primitive appeal, but the boy pulled himself together immediately, as the veteran face, so deeply plowed with suffering, savagely confronted his own. And, as the train moved on, and the wounded man stood there, upright on his crutch, May Margaret saw that there were tears in those fierce eyes—eyes so much older than their years—and a tenderness in the coarse face that brought her heart into her throat.

The journey to Folkestone was all a dream, a dream that she was glad to be dreaming, because she was now on the other side of the barrier that separated people at home from those at the front. The queerest thoughts passed through her mind. She understood for a moment the poor groping endeavors of the war-bereft to break through those darker barriers of the material world, and get into touch, no matter how vaguely, with the world beyond. She felt that in some strange way she was succeeding.

They had lunch on the train. She forced herself to drink some black coffee, and nibble at some tepid mutton. She was vaguely conscious that the correspondents were enjoying themselves enormously at the expense of the State, and she shuddered at the grotesque sense of humor which she discovered amongst her thoughts at this moment.

The Channel-crossing on the troop-ship brought her nearer yet. There was hardly standing-room on any of the decks, and the spectacle was a very strange one, for all the crowded ranks in khaki, officers and men, had been ordered to wear life-belts. A hospital ship which had just arrived was delivering its loads of wounded men to the docks, and these also were wearing life-belts.

The sunset-light was fading as the troop-ship moved out, and the seas had that peculiar iridescent smoothness, as of a delicately tinted skin of very faintly burning oils, which they so often wear when the wind falls at evening. On one side of the ship a destroyer was plowing through white mounds of foam; and overhead there was one of the new silver-skinned scouting air-ships.

Away to the east, a great line of transports was returning home with the wounded, and the horizon was one long stream of black smoke. It was all so peaceful that the life-belts seemed an anomaly, and it was difficult to realize the full meaning of this traffic. The white cliffs of England wore a spiritual aspect that only the hour and its grave significance could lend them; and May Margaret thought that England had never looked so beautiful. There were other troop-ships all crowded, about to follow, and their cheers came faintly across the water. The throb of the engines carried May Margaret's ship away rhythmically, and somewhere on the lower deck a mouth organ began playing, almost inaudibly, "It's a Long, Long Way to Tipperary." The troops were humming the tune, too softly for it to be called singing, and it all blended with the swish of the water and the hum of the engine-room, like a memory of other voices, lost in France and Flanders. May Margaret looked down at the faces. They, too, were grave and beautiful with evening light; and the brave unquestioning simplicity of it all seemed to her an inexpressibly noble thing. She thought for a moment that no pipes among the mists of glen or mountain, no instrument on earth, ever had the beauty of that faint music. It was one of those unheard melodies that are better than any heard. The sea bore the burden. The winds breathed it in undertone; and its message was one of a peace that she could not understand. Perhaps, under and above all the tragedies of the hour, the kingdom of heaven was there.

The cliffs became ghostly in the distance, and suddenly on the dusky waters astern there shone a great misty star. It was the first flash of the shore searchlights, and May Margaret watched it flashing long after the English coast had disappeared. Then she lost the searchlight also; and the transport was left, with the dark destroyer, to find its way, through whatever perils there might be, to the French coast. Millions of men—she had read it—had been transported, despite mines and submarines, without the loss of a single life. She had often wondered how it was possible. Now she saw the answer.

A little black ship loomed up ahead of them and flashed a signal to their escort. Far through the dusk she saw them, little black trawlers and drifters, Lizzie and Maggie and Betsy Jane, signaling all that human courage could discover, of friend or foe, on the face of the waters or under them.

In a very short time they caught the first glimpse of the searchlights on the French coast; and, soon afterwards, they drew into a dark harbor, amid vague cheerings and occasional bursts of the "Marseillaise" from wharves thronged with soldiers of a dozen nationalities. A British officer edged his way through the crowd below them on the quay, and waved his hand to Julian Sinclair.

"Ah, there's our military guide, Captain Crump. Now, if you'll follow me and keep together, we'll get our passports examined quickly, and join him," said the latter, obviously relieved at the prospect of sharing his neutrals with a fellow-countryman.

There followed a brief, but very exact, scrutiny and stamping of papers by an aquiline gentleman whose gold-rimmed spectacles suggested a microscopical carefulness; a series of abrupt introductions to Captain Crump on the gloomy wharf; a hasty bite and sup in a station restaurant, where blue uniforms mingled with khaki, and some red-tabbed British staff-officers, at the next table, were drinking wine with some turbaned Indian Princes. It was a strange glimpse of color and light rifting the darkness for a moment. Then they followed Captain Crump again, through great tarpaulined munition-dumps and loaded motor-lorries, to the two motor-cars behind the station. In these they were whirled, at forty miles an hour, along one of the poplar-bordered roads of France that seemed to-night as ghostly as those titanic alleys of Ulalume, in the song of May Margaret's national poet. Once or twice, as they passed through a cluster of cottages, the night-wind brought a whiff of iodoform, and reminded her that flesh and blood were fighting with pain and death somewhere in that darkness.

Every few minutes they passed troops of dark marching men. Several times it seemed to her that she recognized the face for which she was looking, in some momentary glimmer of starlight.

At last they reached the village where the guests of G. H. Q. were to be quartered. The foreigners were assigned to the château which was used as a guest-house; but there had been one or two unexpected arrivals, and Captain Crump asked the American correspondent if he would mind occupying a room in the house of the curé, a hundred yards away up the village street. The American correspondent was exceedingly glad to do so, and was soon engaged in attempts at conversation with the friendly old man in the black cassock who did his best to make her welcome. There were no more difficulties for her that night, except that the curé had very limited notions as to the amount of water she required for washing.

They set out early the next morning on their way to that part of the front which she had particularly asked to see. The long straight poplar-bordered road, bright with friendly sunshine now, absorbed her. She heard the chatter of the correspondents at her side as in a dream.

"Have you read Anatole France?" said the Spaniard. (He was anxious for improving conversation, and wore a velvet coat totally unsuited to the expedition.) But May Margaret's every thought was plodding along with the plodding streams of dusty, footsore men, in steel hats, and she did not answer. She pointed vaguely to the women working in the fields to save the harvest, and the anti-aircraft guns that watched the sky from behind the sheaves. At every turn she saw something that reminded her of things she had seen before, in some previous existence, when she had lived in the life of her lover and traveled through it all with his own eyes. She was passing through his existence again. He was part of all this: these camps by the roadside, where soldiers, brown as gipsies, rambled about with buckets; these endless processions of motor-lorries, with men and munitions and guns all streaming to the north on every road, as if whole nations were setting out on a pilgrimage and taking their possessions with them; these endless processions of closed ambulances returning, marked with the Red Cross.

Once, over a bare brown stretch of open country, a magnificent body of Indian cavalry swept towards them, every man sitting his horse like a prince; and the British officers, with their sun-burned faces and dusky turbans, hardly distinguishable from their native troops.

"Glorious, aren't they?" said Sinclair, leaning back from his place beside the chauffeur. "But they haven't had a chance yet. If only we could get the Boches out of their burrows and loose our cavalry at them!"

She nodded her head; but her thoughts were elsewhere. This picturesque display seemed to belong to a bygone age; it was quite unrelated to this war of chemists and spectacled old men who disbelieved in chivalry, laughed at right and wrong, and had killed the happiness of the entire world.

She noticed, whenever they passed a village or a farm-house, or even a cattle-shed now, that the smell of iodoform brooded over everything. All these wounded acres of France were breathing it out like the scent of some strange new summer blossoms. A hundred yards away from the ruined outhouses of every village she began to breathe it. Her senses were unusually keen, but it dominated the summer air so poignantly that she could not understand why these meticulously vivid men—the foreign correspondents—were unaware of it. It turned the whole countryside into a series of hospital wards; and the Greek was now disputing with the Spaniard about home-rule for Ireland.

At last, in the distance, they heard a new sound that enlarged the horizon as when one approaches the sea. It was the mutter of the guns, a deep many-toned thunder, rolling up and dying away, but without a single break, incessant as the sound of the Atlantic in storm.

The cars halted in what had once been a village, and was now a rubbish heap of splinters and scarred walls and crumbling mortar.

The correspondents alighted and followed Captain Crump across a broad open plain, pitted with shell-holes. The incessant thunder of the guns deepened as they went.

"Don't touch anything without consulting me," snapped Crump at the Spaniard, who was nosing round an unexploded shell and thinking of souvenirs. "The Boches have a charming trick of leaving things about that may go off in your hands. A chap picked up a spiked helmet here the other day. They buried him in the graveyard that Mr. Grant wants to see. It's a very small grave. There wasn't much left of him."

The burial-ground lay close under a ridge of hills, and they approached it through a maze of recently captured German trenches. It was a strange piece of sad ordered gardening in a devastated world. Every minute or two the flash and shock of a concealed howitzer close at hand shook the loose earth on the graves, but only seemed to emphasize the still sleep of this acre. It held a great regiment of graves, mounds of fresh-turned earth in soldierly ranks, most of them marked with tiny wooden crosses, rough bits of kindling wood. Some of the crosses bore names, written in pencil. There was one that bore the names of six men, and the grave was hardly large enough for a child. They had been blown to pieces by a single shell.

They passed through the French section first. Here there was an austere poetry, a simplicity that approached the sublime in the terrible regularity of the innumerably repeated inscription, "Mort pour la France." In the British section there was a striking contrast. There was not a word of patriotism; but, though the graves were equally regular, an individuality of inscription that interested the Spanish correspondent greatly.

"It is here we pass from Racine to Shakespeare," he said, pointing to a wooden cross that bore the words:

"No, no, no," cried the Greek correspondent, greatly excited by the literary suggestion. "From Flaubert to Dickens! Is it not so, Captain Crump?"

Captain Crump grunted vaguely and moved on towards the soldier in charge. May Margaret followed him, the photograph in her hand.

"We want to find number forty-eight," said Captain Crump.

The soldier saluted and led the way to the other end of the ground. Many of the graves here had not been named. There had evidently been some disaster which made it difficult. Some of them carried the identification disc.

"This is number forty-eight, sir," said the soldier, pausing before a mound that May Margaret knew already by heart. "May I look at the photograph, sir? Yes. You see, that's the rosary—that black thing—round the cross."

"The rosary! I don't understand." May Margaret looked at the string of beads on the cross that bore the name of Brian Davidson.

"I suppose he was a Roman Catholic, sir. They must have taken it from the body."

"No, he was not a Catholic," whispered May Margaret. She felt as if she must drop on her knees and call on the mute earth to speak, to explain, to tell her who lay beneath.

"There must be a mistake," she said at last, and her own voice rang in her ears like the voice of a stranger. "I must find out. How can I find out?"

Her face was bloodless as she confronted Captain Crump.

"There's some terrible mistake," she said again. "I can't face his people at home till I find out. He may be—" But that awful word of hope died on her lips.

"I'll do my best," said Captain Crump. "It's very odd, certainly; but I shouldn't—er—hope for too much. You see, if he were living, they wouldn't have been likely to overlook it. It's possible that he may be there, or there." He pointed to two graves without a name. "Or again, he may be missing, of course, or a prisoner. His lot are down at Arras now. We'll get into touch with them to-morrow and I'll make inquiries. You want to pass a night in the trenches, don't you? I think it can be arranged for you to go to that section to-morrow night. Then we can kill two birds with one stone."

May Margaret thanked him. Behind them, she heard, with that strange sense of double meanings which the most commonplace accidents of life can awake at certain moments—the voice of one of the correspondents, still arguing with the others. "Here, if you like, is Shakespeare," he said:

The quotation, lilted inanely as a nursery rime, pierced her heart like a flight of silver arrows.

"You have not a very pleasant business," the correspondent continued, addressing a soldier at work in an open grave.

"I've 'ad two years in the trenches, sir, and I'm glad to get it," he replied.

"Little Christian crosses, planted against the heathen, creeping nearer and nearer to the Rhine," murmured Julian Sinclair, on the other side of May Margaret.

The multiplicity of the ways in which it seemed possible for both soldiers and civilians to regard the war was beginning to rob her of the power to think.

On their way back, through the dusk, they passed a body of men marching to the trenches, with a song that she had heard Brian humming:

Soon afterwards, with all these themes interchanging in her bewildered mind, May Margaret heard Julian Sinclair calling through the dark from the car ahead: "Take a good look at the next village; it's called Crécy." The stars that watched the ancient bowmen had nothing new to tell her; but a few minutes later, as another body of troops came tramping through the dark to another stanza of their song, there seemed to be an ancient and unconquerable mass of marching harmonies within the lilt of the Cockney ballad; like the mass of the sea behind the breaking wave:

They dined at the château, and she slipped away early to the house of the curé. Before she slept, she took out Brian's last letter and read it. She sat on the narrow bed, under the little black crucifix with the ivory Christ looking down at her from the bare wall. She was glad that it was there; for it embodied the master-thought of that day's pilgrimage. Never before had she realized how that symbol was dominating this war; how it was repeated and repeated over thousands of acres of young men's graves; and with what a new significance the wayside crosses of France were now stretching out their arms in the night of disaster.

In Brian's letter there was very little about himself. He had always been somewhat impatient of the "lyrical people," as he called them, who were "so eloquently introspective" about the war, and he had carried his prejudice even into his correspondence. She was reading his letter again to-night because she remembered that it expressed something of her own bewilderment at the multiplicity of ways in which people were talking and thinking of the international tragedy. "I have heard," he wrote, "every possible kind of opinion out here, with the exception of one. I have never heard any one suggest any possible end for this war but the defeat of the Hun. But I have heard, over and over again, ridicule of the idea that this war is going to end war, or even make the world better.

"Along with that, I've often heard praise of the very militaristic system that we are trying so hard to abolish altogether. Of course, this is only among certain sets of men. But this war has become a war of ideas; and ideas are not always contained or divided by the lines of trenches. We are fighting things out amongst ourselves, in all the belligerent countries, and the most crying need of the Allies to-day is a leader who can crystallize their own truest thoughts and ideals for them.

"You know what my dream was, always, in the days when I was trying my prentice hand in literature. I wanted to help in the greatest work of modern times—the task of bringing your country and mine together. Our common language (and that implies so much more than people realize) is the greatest political factor in the modern world; and, thank God, it's beyond the reach of the politicians. In England, we exaggerate the importance of the mere politician. We do not realize the supreme glory of our own inheritance; or even the practical aspects of it; the practical value of the fact that every city and town and village over the whole of your continent paid homage to Shakespeare during the tercentenary. Carlyle was right when he compared that part of our inheritance with the Indian Empire. It is in our literature that we can meet and read each other's hearts and minds, and that has been our greatest asset during the war. Think what it will mean when two hundred million people, thirty years hence, in North America, are reading that literature and sharing it. Shelley understood it. You remember what he says in the 'Revolt of Islam.' The Germans understand, that's why they're so anxious to introduce compulsory German into your schools and colleges. But our own reactionaries are afraid to understand it.

"After all, this war is only a continuation of the Revolutionary war, when the Englishmen who signed the Declaration of Independence fought an army of hired Germans, directed by Germans. Even their military maps were drawn up in German. It's the same war, and the same cause, and I believe that the New World eventually will come into it. Then we shall have a real leadership. The scheming reactionaries in Europe will fail to keep us apart. We shall yet see our flags united. And then despite all the sneers of the little folk, on both sides of the Atlantic, we shall be able to suppress barbarism in Europe and say (as you and I have said): Those whom God hath joined let no man put asunder.

"There seems to be an epidemic of verse among the armies. I haven't caught it very badly yet; but these were some of my symptoms in a spare moment last week:

II

At ten o'clock the next morning, the two cars were moving at sixty miles an hour along a road that ran parallel with the German trenches. There was a slight screen of canvas to hide the traffic, for the road by Dead-Man's-Corner was not the safest way into Arras at that time. But they reached the city without misadventure, and May Margaret felt nearer now than ever to the secret of the quest.

No dream was ever so strange as this great echoing shell of the deserted city where he, too, had walked so recently. He, too, had passed along these cracked pavements, keeping close to the wall, in order to escape observation from the enemy, whose lines ran through one end of the city at this moment. He had seen these pitiful interiors of shattered houses, where sometimes the whole front had been blown away, leaving the furniture still intact on two floors, and even pictures, a little askew, on the walls. He had seen that little black crucifix over that bed; crossed this grass-grown square; and gone into the shattered railway-station, where the many-colored tickets were strewn like autumn leaves over the glass-littered floor. The Spaniard filled his pockets with them.

They went down a narrow street to the ruins of the cathedral. On one of the deserted houses there was a small placard advertising the Paris edition of a London paper, the only sign of the outside world in all that echoing solitude. The neutrals rejoiced greatly before a deserted insurance office, which still displayed an advertisement of its exceedingly reasonable rates for the lives of peaceful citizens. Their merriment was stopped abruptly by a hollow boom that shook the whole city and rumbled echoing along the deserted streets from end to end.

"That's a Boche shell," said Crump. "It sounds as if they've got the cathedral again."

At noon they lunched under the lee of a hill just outside Arras, that had been drenched with blood a few weeks earlier. The great seas of thunder ebbed and flowed incessantly from sky to sky, as if the hill were the one firm island in the universe and all the rest were breaking up and washing around them. The amazing incongruity of things bewildered May Margaret again. It was more fantastic than any dream. They sat there at ease, eating chicken, munching sandwiches, filling their cups with red wine and white, and ending with black coffee, piping hot from the thermos bottle. Great puffs of brown smoke rose in the distance where our shells were dropping along the German line. It looked as if the trees were walking out from a certain distant wood. Little blue rings of smoke rose from the peaceful cigarettes around her. Bees and butterflies came and went through the sunshine; and, in the stainless blue sky overhead there was a rush and rumor as of invisible trains passing to and fro. The neutrals amused themselves by trying to distinguish between our own and the enemy shells.

At two o'clock Crump rose. "I'll take you along now, Grant, if you are ready," he said. "The rest of you wait here. I shall be back in about ten minutes."

May Margaret stumbled after him down the hill. At the foot, a soldier was waiting; and, hardly conscious of the fact that she had exchanged one guide for another, she found herself plodding silently beside him on her unchanging quest, toward the communication trenches.

"What do they think about things in England, sir?" said her new companion at last, with a curiously suppressed eagerness.

"They are very hopeful," said May Margaret.

"When do they think it will be over?"

"Some of them say in six months."

"Ah, yes. I've been here three years now, and they always say that. At the end of the six months they'll say it again."

It was the first open note of depression that May Margaret had heard. "Do most of the men feel like that?" she said.

"They don't say so, sir, but they all want it to be over." Then he added, with the doggedness of his kind, "Not till we get what we're fighting for, of course. You're a correspondent, sir, aren't you? Well, I never seen the real fax put in the papers yet. There was one of these soldier writers the other day. I saw his book in the Y. M. C. A. hut. He said that the only time he nearly broke his heart was when there was a rumor that Germany was asking for peace before he was able to get into it hisself. That's what I call bloody selfish, sir. All this poytry! (he spat into a shell-hole) making pictures out of it and talking about their own souls. Mind you I'm all for finishing it properly; but it ain't right, the way they look at it. It's like saying they're glad the Belgians had their throats cut because it's taught their own bloody selves the beauty of sacrifice. If what they say is true, why in the hell do they want the war ever to stop at all? P'raps if it went on for ever, we should all of us learn the bloody beauty of it, and keep on learning it till there wasn't any one left. There was a member of Parliament out here the other day. He saw three poor chaps trying to wash in a mine-crater full of muddy water. Covered with lice they was. The paper described it afterwards. The right honorable gentleman laughed 'artily, it said, same as they say about royalty. Always laughing 'artily. P'raps he didn't laugh. I dunno about that. But if he did, I'd like him to 'ave a taste of the fun hisself."

They were entering the long tunnel of the communication-trench now. The soldier went ahead, and May Margaret followed, through smells of earth, and the reek of stale uniforms, for a mile or more, till they came to the alert eyes along the fire-step of the front-line trench.

"Here's Major Hilton, sir." A lean young man with a thin aquiline nose and a face of Indian red approached them, stepping like a cat along the trench.

"Mr. Grant," he said.

May Margaret nodded, and they were about to shake hands, when one side of the trench seemed to rise up and smash against their faces, with a roar that stunned them. May Margaret picked herself up at once, wiping the bits of grit out of her eyes. The bombardment appeared to be growing in intensity.

"That was pretty near," said Major Hilton. "You'd better come into my dugout till this blows over."

He led the way into his gloomy little cavern. It was not much of a shelter from a direct hit; but it would protect them from flying splinters at least.

"Mr. Davidson was my friend," said May Margaret at once. "I know his people. I think there must be some mistake about ... about the grave."

"You're not a relative of his, are you?" said Major Hilton. "Had you known him for long?"

"No. Less than a year."

"Well, I don't mind telling you that there was a mistake. We discovered it a few hours after it was made; but we thought it better not to upset his people by giving them further details."

"He was killed, then," May Margaret whispered; and, if the darkness of the dugout had not veiled her face, Major Hilton would not have continued.

"Yes. It was a trench raid. The Boches took a section of our trenches. When we recovered it, we found him. You'd better not tell his people, but I don't mind telling you. It was a pretty bad case."

"What do you mean?"

"One of those filthy Boche tricks. They'd nailed him up against the lining of the trench with bayonets. He was still alive when we found him. But they'll get it all back. We're going to give 'em hell to-night."

May Margaret was silent for so long that Major Hilton peered at her more closely. Her white face looked like a bruised thing in the darkness.

"I'm sorry," he said. "Perhaps I shouldn't have told you. They have done so much of that kind of thing, I suppose we've got used to it. Well, you've been tramping about all day, and if I were you, as you're going to spend the night here, I should settle down for a bit in the dugout. The bombardment seems to be easing off a little, and you'll want to be awake all night. There'll be some sights coming on of the picturesque kind—fireworks and things, which is what you want, I suppose, for the blessed old public."

Far away, in another section of the trenches, there was a burst of cheering. Major Hilton pricked up his ears to listen; but it was drowned immediately in another blast outside that sealed the mouth of the dugout like a blow from a gigantic hammer and plunged them into complete darkness thick with dust and sand.

"Are you all right?" said Hilton, in a moment or two. "They've blown the parapet over us. Our chaps will soon get us out."

They sat down and waited. The sound of their rescuers' shovels was followed almost immediately by the pulling away of a sandbag, and the dusty daylight filtered in again, bringing with it another roar of cheering, nearer now, and rolling along the trenches like an Atlantic breaker.

"What the hell are they shouting about?" Hilton grunted, as he scrambled through the opening. May Margaret was about to follow him, when the abrupt answer struck her motionless.

"America has declared war, sir."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, sir. They are passing the President's message along the line. It looks as if they mean business."

May Margaret had moved further back into the darkness of the dugout. She was breathing quickly, panting like a thirsty dog. She dropped on her knees by an old packing-case in the corner.

"Thank God. Thank God," she repeated, with her eyes shut. Then the tears came, and her whole body shook.

A hand touched her shoulder. She rose to her feet and saw the bewildered face of Major Hilton, peering again at her own.

"I'm sorry," she said. "It's the first time I've done it since I was a kid; but I've been hoping for this ever since the beginning. It's my country, you see."

"I've just been looking at the President's message," said Hilton. "I'm an Englishman, but—if a democracy can discipline itself—I'm not sure that yours won't be the greatest country in the world. I suppose it must be, or the Lord wouldn't have entrusted so much to you. He gave you the best that we ever had to give, and that was our Englishman, George Washington; and the best thing that George Washington ever did, was to fight the German King and his twenty thousand Hessians. Eh, what?"

It was a little after dusk when the unexpected happened. There had been a lull in the bombardment; and, on Major Hilton's advice, May Margaret was resting in the dugout in readiness for the long wakeful night of the trenches.

She lay there, dazed as from shell-shock by the account of Brian's death; and the declaration of war from her own country had burst upon her with an equal violence, leaving her stunned in a kind of "No Man's Land," a desolate hell, somewhere between despair and triumph. Her world had broken up. Her mind was no longer her own. Her thoughts were helpless things between enormous conflicting forces; and, as if to escape from their rending clutches, as if to cling to the present reality, she whispered to herself the words of the wounded soldier at Charing Cross station: "If you meet him, give him hell for me! Give him hell for me." It seemed as if it were Brian himself speaking. Once, with a swift sense of horror, catching herself upon the verge of insanity, she found that her imagination was furtively beginning to picture his last agony, and she stopped it, screwing her face up, like a child pulling faces at a nightmare, and making inarticulate sounds to drive it away.

Of one thing she was quite certain now. She did not wish to live any longer in a world where these things were done. She meant, by hook or by crook, to get to the dangerous bit of the trench, where our men were only separated by six yards from the enemy, and to stay there until she was killed. Even if she couldn't throw bombs herself, she supposed that she could hand them up to others. And any thought that conflicted with this idea she suppressed, automatically, with her monotonous echo of the wounded soldier, "Give them hell for me."

But she was spared any further trouble about the execution of her plans; and she knew, at once, that she had come to the end of her quest, when she heard the quick sharp cries of warning outside.

It was a trench-raid, brief, and unimportant from a military point of view. The newspapers told London, on the next day, that nothing of importance had happened. Half a dozen revolvers cracked. There were curses and groans, a sound of soft thudding blows and grunting, gasping men, followed by a loud pig-like squeal. Then May Margaret saw three faces peering cautiously into the dugout, faces of that strange brutality, heavy-boned, pig-eyed, evil-skulled, which has impressed itself upon the whole world as a distinct reversion from all civilized types of humanity. She knew them, as one recognizes the smell of carrion; and her whole soul exulted as she seized her supreme chance of striking at the evil thing. She had picked up a revolver almost unconsciously, and without pausing to think she fired three times with a steady hand. Two of them she knew that she had killed. The third had been too quick for her, and in another second she was down on her back, with a blood-greased boot on her throat, and a throng of evil-smelling cattle around her. Unhappily, they did not kill her at once; and so the discovery was made, amidst a storm of guttural exclamations.

When the trench was retaken, half an hour later, a further discovery was made by Major Hilton. A locket containing a photograph of Brian Davidson was buried in what remained of her left breast, as if it had been trying to hide in her heart. It was almost the only thing about her that was unhurt.

Major Hilton made no explanations; but when the body was removed, he gave strict orders for it to be buried by the side of Lieutenant Davidson.

A week later, Mr. Harvey, of the Chicago Bulletin, was informed that his correspondent, Mr. Martin Grant, had died of pneumonia. The authorities left the responsibility of informing others, who might be interested, to his capable hands.

He went to see Julian Sinclair about it; but he could not discover whether that sincerely regretful young diplomat with the dazzling smile and the delightful manners knew anything more. It may have been a coincidence that, shortly afterwards, Mr. Harvey was recalled to the shores of Lake Michigan, and replaced by another manager.