34 LAND & WATER August lo, i(ji6 
You knov; how you peer :ind ?nuff nt the night when the North-East g^-wind:. blow:" 
" By ihc One ivho made us aitu maimed us," quotli lower V.-ilhalla •' wc'know .' " 
" Sudden, oui of the blackness, sudden as Hell, there came 
I-ioar and rattle of rifles, spurts of machine-gun Hame ; 
And Joe stood up in the forward sap to try and fathom the game. 
Sudden, their shells come screaming ; sudden, his nostrils sniff 
The sicUening reek of the rotten pears, the death that kills witli a whiff. 
Death ! and he knows it certain, as he bangs on his cartridge-case, 
With the gas-cloud's claws at his windpipe and the gas-cloud's wings on his face. . . 
We heard his gong in our dug-out, he only whacked on it twice, 
We whipped our gas-bags over our heads, and manned the step in a trice — 
]^or the cloud would-havc caught us as sure as Fate if he'd taken the Staff's advii:e." 
His head was deft with a great red wound from the chin to the tprnple-bone, 
But his voice was as clear as a sounding gong, " I'll be damned if I'll drink alone, 
Not even in lower Valhalla ! Is he free of the free Canteen, 
My mate who comes with the unfleshed point and the full-charged magazine ? " 
The gashed heads rose at the Rifleman o'er the rings of the Endless Smoke, 
And loud as the roar of a thousand guns Valnalla's answer broke, 
And loud as the crash of a thousand shells their tankards clashed on the board : 
" He is free of the mess of the Killer-men, your mate of the unfleshed sword ; 
For we know the worth of his deed on earth ; as we knoiv the speed of the death 
Which catches its man by the back of the throat and gives him water for breath ; 
As we know how the hand at the helmet-cloth may tarry seconds too long, 
When the very life of the front-line trench is staked on the beat of a gong. 
By the four vou slew, by the case he smote, by the grey gas-cloud and the green, 
We pass your mate for the Endless Smoke and the beer of the free Canteen." 
In the lower hall of Valhalla, with the heroes of no renown. 
With our nameless dead of the Marne and the Aisne, of Mons, and of Wipers town 
With the men who killed ere they died for us, sits Rifleman Joseph Brown. 
Flanders, June, 1916. 
Two Years Ago 
By an Englishwoman in Paris 
I 
HAVE just been reading the diary I kept in detail formation scene in a theJitre. Men with bundles marched 
during July and August, 1914, here in Paris. It to the stations in groups, or stood at street corners 
makes strange and naive reading. On July 31st it bidding farewell to their womenfolk. If one hailed an 
_ says : " Germany seems to want war," as though empty cab the driver waved a refusal, and cried : " I'm 
tliat were surprising ; on August 7th it comments on the of? ! " ' In the doorway of the house next door to mine, 
sinking of a British cruiser by a mine, that •" laying the husband of the concierge, due to leave that evening, 
mines in shallow water is a bit less than decent." Were ^ stood. wisthilly watching his little daughter, and worrying 
we really so childlike in those days ? Yes, for the diary her constantly by calling her back to be kissed, when 
was written day by day, and with a never-ceasing care • she wanted to play with other children, 
to say less than the truth for fear of exaggerating. It Late in the evening, I was told that it seemed as 
is almost like looking back on a state of innocence to " though England were not coming to the aid of France, 
see what hopeless fables we believed, what legends of It was like something black being put over one's head, 
honour and of chivalrous foes, what slender standards" It was' too horrible. One cried out : " It isn't true!" 
of evil : " London is horrified by a dreadful story. that as mothers do whose sons have committed a crime. We 
thereareathousandBritish wounded," wrote my mother received no English papers for several days, and the 
late in August. A thousand ! French papers had only meagre Ejiglish news. On 
Two years. have passed, and the human mind has Monday evening they published ^the news that we would 
adapted" itself to the_background of horror and death ; defend the North Sea. It was not much, but it was 
Paris and London have gradually changed back towards something- for the moment it seemed everything. One 
their normal state, but London never changed as Paris felt as thougli one had been a piece of lead snikmg through 
did. Those who spent that August here will never forget a bottomless sea, and suddenly one was changed to cork, 
it ; every day, every hour, brought a poignant epiotion. and came bobbing up to tin; light of Heaven. It is j)er- 
Weairexpected, after the first few days, to be, besieged haps difficult to people who were in England to realise 
and bombarded, or at least to have the. Germans in what those two days felt like to English people in France, 
occupation. That was the chief prospect, in relation to We got the papers later, and read the arguments for 
which we had to organise our lives, provision our larders. and against coming into the war. .\s though there were 
But other things interested us more, such as the mobilisa- any arguments! To us here the thing presented itself 
tion, the attitude of England, and, of course.thc actual (and I may say I met every l\pe of the very mixed 
fact< of war. We were kept much in the dark. Day after linglish colony in that week-end, and they were all of 
day one cried : If only we knew what is going.on ! The the. one idea) as being simply and solely the choice 
newspapers gave the 'most meagre intelligence, such as between black dishonour and right. 
that a small Belgian boy scout had captured -a large The French were naturally very anxious too. lliey 
I'hlan, that Liege was supposed to be still holding out, stopped English people in the street to ask what we 
and so forth, but nothing precise and sure. were going to do. They were nervous, anxious, dis- 
The mobilisatfftn order was posted in Paris -at four tressed ; but we lixcd in an acute misery that amounted 
o'clock on the afternoon of Saturday,. -August 1st. In to agony. If England had remained neutral, the British 
half an hour Paris was changed as if she were a trans- (Continued on page 3G) 
