A thaw set in.

All night the snow hurried from the branches, slid down the tree trunks, sank into the ground. Sank into the moss, which suddenly uncovered, breathed water as a sponge breathes beneath the sea; sank into the Oise, which set up a roaring as the rising water sapped and tunnelled under its banks.

With a noise of thunder the winter roof of the villa slipped down and fell into the garden—leaving the handiwork of man exposed to the dawn—streaming tiles, ornamental chimneys, unburied gargoyles, parapet, and towers of wood.

In a still earlier hour, while darkness yet concealed the change of aspect, Fanny left the garden with a lantern in her hand. She had a paper in her pocket, and on the paper was written the order of her mission; the order ran clearly: "To take one officer to the demobolisation centre at Amiens and proceed to Charleville"; but the familiar words "and return" were not upon it.

She cast no glance back, yet in her mind sent no glance forward. She could not think of what she left; she left nothing, since these romantic forests would be as empty as tunnels when Julien was not there; but closing the door of the garden gate softly behind her, she blew out the lantern and hung it to the topmost spike, that Stewart, who was leaving for England in the morning, might bequeath it to their landlady.

All night long the Renault had stood ready packed in the road by the villa—and now, starting the engine, which ran soundlessly beneath the bonnet—she drove from a village whose strangeness was hidden from her, followed the Oise, which rumbled on a new note, heard the bubbling of wild brooks through the trees, and was lost in the steamy moisture of a thawing forest.

There was a sad, a deadly charm still about the journey. There was a bitter and a sweet comfort yet before her. There were two hours of farewell to be said at dawn. There was the sight of his face once more for her. That the man who slipped into the seat beside her at Chantilly was Julien dissolved her courage and set her heart beating. She glanced at him in that early light, and he at her. Two hours before them still.

She was to carry him with her only to lose him surely; he was to accompany her on her journey only to turn back.

All the way to Amiens he reassured himself and her: "In a week I will come to Charleville."

And she replied: "Yes, this is nothing. I lose you here, but in a week you will come."

(Why then this dread?)

"In a week—in a week," ran the refrain.

"How will you find me at Charleville? Will you come to the garage?"

"No, I shall write to the 'Silver Lion.' You will find in the middle of the main street an old inn with mouldering black wood upon the window sashes. How well I know it! I will write there."

"We are so near the end," she said suddenly, "that to have said
'Good-bye' to you, to leave you at Amiens, is no worse than this."

And faster she hurried towards Amiens to find relief. He did not contradict her, or bid her go slower, but as they neared Amiens, offered once more his promise that they would meet again in a week.

"It isn't that," she said. "I know we shall meet again. It isn't that I fear never to see you again. It is the closing of a chapter."

"I, too, know that."

They drove into Amiens in the streaming daylight.

The rain poured.

"I am sending you to my home," he said. "Every inch of the country is mine. You go to a town that I know, villages that I know, roads that I have walked and ridden and driven upon. You go to my country. I like to think of that."

"I shall go at once to see your house in Revins."

"Yes—oh, you will see it easily—on the banks of the Meuse. I was born there. In a week, in a few days, in a short time—I will come, too."

She stopped the car in a side street of the town.

Lifting her hands she said: "They want to hold you back." Then placed them back on the wheel. "They can't," she said, and shook her head.

He took his bag in his hand, and stood by the car, looking at her.

"You take the three o'clock train back to Paris when the papers are through," she said hurriedly with sudden nervousness. And then: "Oh, we've said everything! Oh, let's get it over—"

He held the side of the car with his hand, then stepped back sharply.
She drove down the street without looking back.

There was a sort of relief in turning the next corner, in knowing that if she looked back she would see nothing. A heavy shadow lifted from her; it was a deliverance. "Good-bye" was said—was over; that pain was done—now for the next, now for the first of the days without him. She had slipped over the portal of one sorrow to arrive at another; but she felt the change, and her misery lightened. This half-happiness lasted her all the morning.

She moved out of Amiens upon the St. Quentin road, and was almost beyond the town before she thought of buying food for the day. Unjustly, violently, she reflected: "What a hurry to leave me! He did not ask if I had food, or petrol, or a map—"

But she knew in her heart that it was because he was young and in trouble, and had left her quickly, blindly, as eager as she to loosen that violent pain.

She bought a loaf of bread, a tin of potted meat, an orange and a small cheese, and drove on upon the road until she came to WarfusÉe. Wherever her thoughts fell, wherever her eye lay, his personality gnawed within her—and nowhere upon her horizon could she find anything that would do instead. Julien, who had moved off down the street in Amiens, went moving off down the street of her endless thought.

"I have only just left him! Can't I go back?" And this cry, carried out in the nerves of her foot, slowed the car up at the side of the road. She looked back—no smoke darkened the landscape. Amiens was gone behind her.

Again, on. In ten minutes the battlefields closed in beside the road.

Julien was gone. Stewart was gone. Comfort and ease and plenty were gone. "But We are here again!" groaned the great moors ahead, and on each hand. The dun grass waved to the very edge of the road cut through it. Deep and wild stretched the battlefields, and there, a few yards ahead, were those poor strangers, the scavenging Chinamen.

Upon a large rough signpost the word "Foucaucourt" was painted in white letters. A village of spars and beams and broken bricks—yet here, as everywhere, returning civilians hunted like crows among the ruins, carrying beams and rusty stoves, and large umbrellas for the rain.

At the next corner a Scotch officer hailed her.

"Will you give me a lift?"

He sat down beside her.

"What do you do?" she asked.

"I look after Chinamen."

"Ah, how lonely!"

"It is terrible," he replied. "Look at it! Dead for miles; the army gone, and I here with these little yellow fellows, grubbing up the crumbs."

She put him down at what he called "my corner"—a piece of ground indistinguishable from the rest.

"Is that where you live?"

"Yes."

There was a black-boarded hut from whose chimney smoke exuded, and to this ran a track across the grass. She watched him walk along it, a friendless, sandy man, left over from the armies which had peopled the rabbit warren in the ground. The Renault loped on with its wolf-like action, and she felt a spring of relief that she lived upon moving ground; passing on down the rickety road she forgot the little man.

Ahead lay the terrible miles. She seemed to make no gain upon them, and could not alter the face of the horizon, however fast she drove. Iron, brown grass—brown grass and iron, spars of wood, girders, torn railway lines and stones. Even the lorries travelling the road were few and far between. A deep loneliness was settled upon the desert where nothing grew. Yet, suddenly, from a ditch at the side of the road, a child of five stared at her. It had its foot close by a stacked heap of hand grenades; a shawl was wrapped round it and the thin hands held the ends together. What child? Whose? How did it get here, when not a house stood erect for miles and miles—when not a coil of smoke touched the horizon! Yes, something oozed from the ground! Smoke, blue smoke! Was life stirring like a bulb under this whiter ruin, this cemetery of village bones?

She stopped the car. The child turned and ran quickly across a heap of dust and iron and down into the ground behind a pillar. "It must have a father or mother below—" The breath of the invisible hearth coiled up into the air; the child was gone.

A man appeared behind the pillar and came towards the car. Fanny held out her cigarette-case and offered it to him.

"Have you been here long?" she asked.

"A month, mademoiselle."

"Are there many of you in this—village?" (Not a spar, not a pile of bricks stood higher than two feet above the ground.)

"There are ten persons now. A family came in yesterday."

"But how are you fed?"

"A lorry passes once a week for all the people in this district—within fifty miles. There are ten souls in one village, twenty in another, two in another. They have promised to send us huts, but the huts don't come. We have sunk a well now and it is drinkable, but before that we got water by lorry once a week, and we often begged a little from the radiators of other lorries."

"What have you got down there?"

"It is the cellar of my house, mademoiselle. There are two rooms still, and one is watertight. The trouble is the lack of tools. I can't build anything. We have a spade, and a pick and a hammer, which we keep between the ten of us."

"Take my hammer," said Fanny. "I can get another in the garage."

He took it, pleased and grateful, and she left this pioneer of recolonisation, this obstinate Crusoe and his family, standing by his banner of blue smoke.

Another hour and a large signpost arrested her attention.

"This was Villers Carbonel," it told her, and beneath it three roads ran in different directions. There was no sign at all of the village—not a brick lay where the signpost stood.

Stopping the car she drew out her map and considered—and suddenly, out of nowhere, with a rattle and a bang, and a high blast on a mad little horn, a Ford arrived at her side upon the cross-roads.

"Got no gas?" enquired an American. She looked up into his pink face. His hood was broken and hung down over one side of the car. One of his springs was broken and he appeared to be holding the car upright by the tilt of his body. His tyres were in rags, great pieces of rubber hung out beyond the mudguards.

"Dandy car you've got!" he said with envy. "French?"

Soon he was gone upon the road to Chaulnes. His retreating back, with the spindly axle, the wild hood, the torn fragments of tyre flying round in streamers, and the painful list of the body set her laughing, as she stood by the signpost in the desert.

Then she took the road to Peronne.

"I won't have my lunch yet—" looking at the pale sun. Her only watch had stopped long since, resenting the vibrations of the wheel. She passed Peronne—uprooted railways and houses falling head foremost into the river, and beyond it, side roads led her to a small deserted village, oddly untouched by shell or fire. Here the doors swung and banged, unlatched by any human fingers, the windows, still draped with curtains, were shut, and no face looked out. Here she ate her lunch.

The rain had ceased and a little pale sunshine cheered the cottages, the henless, dogless, empty road. A valiant bird sang on a hedge beside her.

With her wire-cutters she opened the tin of potted meat, and with their handle spread it on the bread.

"Lord, how lonely it is—surely some door might open, some face look out—" At that a little gust of wind got up, and she jumped in her seat, for a front door slammed and blew back again.

"I couldn't stay here the night—" with a shiver—and the bird on the branch sang louder than ever. "It's all very well," she addressed him. "You're with your own civilisation. I'm right out of mine!"

The day wore on. The white sun, having finished climbing one side of the sky, came down upon the other.

Here and there a man hailed her, and she gave him a lift to his village, talked a little to him, and set him down.

A young Belgian, who had learned his English at Eton, was her companion for half an hour.

"And you are with the French?" he asked. "How do you like the fellows?"

"I like them very much. I like them enormously." (Strange question, when all France meant Julien!)

"Don't you find they think there is no one else in the world?" he grumbled. "It is a delicious theory for them, and it must be amusing to be French!"

"Little Belgium—jealous young sister, resentful of the charm of the elder woman of the world!"

A French lieutenant climbed to the seat beside her.

"You are English, mademoiselle?" he said, she thought with a touch of severity. He was silent for a while. Then: "Ah, none but the English could do this—"

"What?"

"Drive as you do, alone, mademoiselle, amid such perils."

She did not ask to what perils he alluded, and she knew that his words were a condemnation, not a compliment. Ah, she knew that story, that theory, that implication of coldness! She did not trouble to reply, nor would she have known how had she wished it.

They passed an inhabited village. From a door flew a man in a green bonnet and staggered in the street. After him a huge peasant woman came, and standing in the doorway shook her fist at him. "I'll teach you to meddle with my daughter—"

"Those are the cursed Italians!" said the French lieutenant, leaning from the car to watch.

A mile further on they came to a quarry, in which men prowled in rags.

"Those are the Russians!" he said. And these were kept behind barbed wire, fenced round with armed sentries.

She remembered an incident in Paris, when she had hailed a taxi.

"Are you an American?" asked the driver. "For you know I don't much like driving Americans."

"But I am English."

"Well, that's better. I was on the English Front once, driving for the
French Mission."

"Why don't you like Americans?"

"Among other things they give me two francs when three is marked!"

"But once they gave you ten where three was marked!"

"That's all changed!" laughed the taxi-man. "And it's a long story. I don't like them."

* * * * *

"Go away!" said France restlessly, pushing at the new nations in her bosom. "It's all done. Go back again!"

"Are you an Ally?" said the Allies to each other balefully, their eyes no longer lit by battle, but irritable with disillusion—and each told his women tales of the other's shortcomings.

Along the sides of the roads, in the gutters, picking the dust-heap of the battlefields, there were representatives of other nations who did not join in the inter-criticism of the lords of the earth. Chinese, Arabs and Annamites made signs and gibbered, but none cared whether they were in amity or enmity.

Only up in Germany was there any peace from acrimony. There the Allies walked contentedly about, fed well, looked kindly at each other. There were no epithets to fling—they had all been flung long ago.

And the German people, looking curiously back, begged buttons as souvenirs from the uniforms of the men who spoke so many different languages.