Patrick and Sheila had no alternative but to put up their hands, but the Volunteer captain tried to escape, and was promptly shot by a constable. Blake asked what they were doing at such an hour on the highroad, and Patrick was starting his usual story of how he and his sister were on their way from Dublin to attend an urgent case in the country, but when he caught sight of his brother William standing behind Blake, he faltered and remained dumb.

Before Blake could ask any more questions they had to jump to one side to avoid a Crossley full of Auxiliaries, which dashed past, and stopped a few yards beyond them, the Cadets at once jumping out and taking up positions on each side of the car with Lewis guns trained to sweep the road as far as the big rock. Blake, after ordering William and a constable to take Patrick and Sheila down the Ballybor road out of the line of fire until he could deal with them, took command of

By this time it was daylight, and the police, who had worked round the flanks of the ambushers, began to make it pretty hot for the men in the trenches. Now it is one thing to shoot an unfortunate policeman perched up in a stationary lorry in the middle of the road, and quite a different story when the policeman starts to shoot you in the back from behind a tree, and very soon the Volunteers broke from their trenches and started to stream down the Ballybor road.

There was a momentary lull in the firing, broken by two hurricane bursts of fire from the Cadets' Lewis guns, and the Volunteers fell in little heaps on the grey limestone road; the remainder hesitated, and then ran for their trenches, to be met by a hail of bullets from the police, who had taken up positions commanding the trenches while the Volunteers were trying to escape by the road.

Again they tried to escape along the road, and again the Lewis guns spat out a magazine of bullets whilst a man could count five, the noise of the guns being intensified by the dead wall of trees.

The few Volunteers now left threw down their arms, put up their hands, and the fight was over.

In the meantime William had taken his brother and sister down the Ballybor road until they came to the lane where the car was, and here

Colin wanted to see this beneficent passion at work. So he captured one of the embassy's many cockroaches, and put it down in front of the tortoise's nose, like an early Christian presented to a lion. The tortoise eyed the offered feast, and mused deeply. The cockroach did not muse. It was a cockroach of action. Without any apparent need for reflection it bolted for cover, like a flash of blackness, right into the tortoise's shell, and hid itself in that profounder thinker's armpit.

The cadet of a dynasty of ambassadors was charmed with the cockroach's wit. He filed the whole affair in a pigeonhole of his 'cute little mind. As he grew up he would often chuckle to think of it. Piquant parallels would occur to him.

When Colin was twenty the war came. "C'est beau, ça," he said, when he saw what was done on the spot by most of the young men that he knew. He was a connoisseur.

He

I.

could tell a fine gesture. "It makes fools," he said, scoffers. It is as if God had broken loose out of the churches. Little new peers like my dear cousin Grax are becoming patrician. The rich are fairly jumping through the needle's eye-flocks of 'em-sheep at a gap."

Colin was not to be carried off his own feet by any rush to take arms. He made no holy excuses about the omission: his sense of humour saved him from that. The only kind of humbug that it would allow him to practise was humbug conscious and gleeful-not Pecksniff's humbug; only Sganarelle's. It was a vital interest to him, he demurely said, not to be dead. And how could a ruling class rule from the tomb ? Might not one honestly praise Father Damien without rushing off to nurse lepers ? Besides, his elder brother was badly wounded already; life, he pointed out, might at any moment become vastly more worth living than ever.

And yet the war, and the way that his caste thought about it, were not to be easily talked out of his path. Like lions, they straddled across it; like tortoises, they impended

who may have done little harm. Colin was one of them. "G.H.Q., 5th Echelon," was his army address. By day he sat in a tin hut, properly warmed. His casement opened on the Channel's foam. A sergeant-major brought him forms to sign, and said, "The place, sir, for the name is 'ere." name is 'ere." He had a telephone soon-a great help in crying off dinner engagements whenever a more amusing one came. He made the right faces when any one called. He was always game for a round of golf with the Brigadier at Le Touquet. For these duties his qualifications were excellent French and Italian. He may not have borne any physical part in the great westward retreat. But how could he? What good would it do to wade into the sea?

For three months Colin led a life of rude health, brightened by spirited tiffs with other saviours of the country. Ruder disputes going on elsewhere formed a dim, distinguished background for these engaging figures battles and sieges, the Marne and the Aisne, the fall of Antwerp, the First Battle of Ypres. Colin was highly aware of the value of all this forest distance of tapestried gloom against which his own foreground figure was planted. He knew what was what. this was romance, like the whining of winds that have

All

blown over deserts of snow when they sniff at night round the house where a person, who knows what is what, lies in bed, with the firelight leaping or musing.

Then came the Deluge. Or, rather, one of the Deluges. Colin would say: "Poor old G.H.Q. was made to be inundated and reinundated, like Holland, on proper occasions. Or it's like England, with Picts and Brythons and Angles and Normans all rushing it in their turns. All of us here are exconquerors, layer on layer of us. First to charge in were

the War Office braves, the old hands, the mighty hunters of good jobs before the Lord. I came as a sutler with them. I'm the jeune premier arriviste. Then, after three months of the war, the notes of a distant recessional march strike our ears, a thunderous tramping is heard in the east, and there burst in upon us the pick of the old Regulars from the front -oh, not all of them, only those who had found that it was not the right sort of war, and that they had the right sort of friends. Approaching, they took a short run, and fairly butted and rammed their way into shelter, with all their mothers and uncles pushing them hard from behind-fell right in on top of us here with their cavalry spurs and their Guards knickerbockers and buttons and swashing and martial outsides. They were like the saints taking the Kingdom of Heaven by storm. We tried to be nice to them; sat as close as we could to make room; cut our work in two and gave them half, like St Martin's; talked to them kindly and wittily. They only stared. Then I knew them-the poor old Army Class worthies at school. Look at Claude, par exemple his eyes! There is no speculation in those eyes.'"

Claude Barbason's brain, it may be, was not all air and

And Colin was yoked to him now. They bit wooden penholders in the same hut, and perfected a dislike of each

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other that they had roughed out in peace time in London. "Ever see," Colin would pleasantly ask you, such a good German as Claude? qu'il y a de Boche, absolument !" Claude's face, indeed, with its pink-and-white gravity, heavy blue eyes and straw hair, did call up visions of German officer prisoners. No doubt he had, through his ancestors, sojourned in England a good thirteen hundred years. Still, you could fancy him, that long ago, full of home thoughts of West Saxony, marching Londonward from the sea, mopping the sweat from pink cheeks and shaking the yellow hair away from china-blue eyes, to see for the first time, from the Kentish chalk downs, the Thames shining below through the trees.

Claude could take his own part without positive sparkle in this commerce in compliments. Colin to him was "the mountebank," with his "bounding cleverness " and his "beastly quotations." Colin, he said, dirtied everything that he touched; he seemed to like rolling himself and every one else in the mud; he called the scarlet Staff tabs-which they were both seeking-the Red Badge of Funk; he said the Job Lot Mess, where they and the other odds-and-ends ate, ought to hang out a sign on a board, "Au Ravitaillement des Embusqués "; he called Fifth Echelon "Chelsea and "Greenwich" because, as he idiotically said, it gave a secure