It was on a day in early March of this year, with a cloudless blue sky overhead, that I stepped carefully off the muddy track on to the little strip of ‘sown field’ —with the blades of wheat, brilliantly green, just showing above ground—which separated me from Luke Copse Cemetery. This tiny spot, ‘for ever England,’ lies just over the old German lines that for so long lay, an impassable barrier, between Hébuterne and Serre.

I had come up that morning by car from Amiens. We had bowled along the great road to Albert in smooth security. The driver—who had done this kind of work often before—began by being vastly communicative. I must see the old G.H.Q. at Querieu Château; but it had meant little to me during the war years, and meant less than ever to me now. Then there was the bold notice painted in English on a barn wall, Dangerous Corner; that, too, I must note. Reminiscences of 1870 began to brim over his practised lips; a cemetery on the left, a monument on the right. But I was dull to respond; memories were marshalling themselves anew, stirring out of their long slumbers, awakening at contact with the familiar slopes of Picardy : that road there, on the left, it recalls a march —its destination long since forgotten, not even now to be recalled—but, somehow, clear as crystal, is the memory of that moving column, and myself a tiny part of it.