The Red Planet

, and will you be so kind as to s

He was Sergeant in my battery, and the same Boer shell did for both of us. At times we join in cursing that shell heartily, but I am not sure that we do not hold it in sneaking affection. It initiated us into the brotherhood of death. Shortly afterwards when we had crossed the border-line back into life, we exchanged, as tokens, bits of the shrapnel which they had extracted from our respective carcases. I have not enquired what he did with his

the slit of a letter-box mouth of the Irishman in caricature, and only half a dozen teeth spaced like a skeleton company. Nothing will induce him to procure false ones. It is a matter of principle. Between the wearing of false hair and the wearing of false teeth he makes a distinction of unfathomable subtlety. He is an obstinate beast. If he wasn't he would not, with four fingers of his right hand shot away, have remained with me on that gun. In the same way, neither tears nor entreaties nor abuse have induced him to wear a glass eye. On high days and holidays, whenever he desires to look smart and dashing, he covers the unpleasing orifice w

one beautiful eye of Sergeant Marigold wa

y chair from th

Anthon

our ago looking as well a

very reassur

the argument. "They've se

said I, "I'll st

gate, he picked me up-luckily I have always been a small spare man-and deposited me in the car. I am always nervous of anyone but Marigold trying to carry

de the chauffeur

about myself, to explain why Lady Fenimore should have sent for me in so peremptory a fashion. Following the model of my favourite author Balzac-you need the awful leisure that has been mine to appreciate him-I ought to describe the hou

how I come to be

h, I found thrust upon me the parts of father-confessor, intermediary, judge, advocate, and conspirator.... For look you, what kind of a life can a man lead situated as I am? The crowning glory of my days, my wife, is dead. I have neither chick nor child. No

eir spines. In the meanwhile, I serve on as many War Committees in Wellingsford as is physically possible for Sergeant Marigold to get me into. I address recruiting meetings. I have taken earnest young Territorial artillery officers in courses of gunnery. You know they work with my own beloved old fifteen pounders, brought up to date with new breeches, recoils, shields, and limbers. For months there was a brigade in Wellings Park, and I used to watch their drill. I was like an old actor coming once again befor

the truculent new red brick Post Office sneers across the flagged market square at the new Portland-stone Town Hall, while the old thatched corn-market sleeps in the middle and the Early English spire of the Norman church dreams calmly above them. Once, I say, a Sleepy Hollow, but now alive with the tramp of soldiers and the rumble of artillery and transport; for Wellingsford is the centre of a district occupied by a division, which means twenty thousand men of all arms, and the streets and roads swarm with men in khaki, and troops are billeted in all the h

late R.F.A., aged forty-seven; and I live in a comfortable little house at the extreme north end of the High Street, standing some way back from the road; so that in fine weather I can sit in my front garden and wat

y. By building a series of two or three rooms on to the ground floor of the house, so that I could live in it without the need of being carried up and down stairs, and by acquiring skill in the manipulation of my tricycle chair, I can

ride of a district braggart of its chestnuts and its beeches, but now leafless and dreary, spreading out an infinite tracery of branch and twig against a grey February sky. Thence we emerged into the open of rolling pasture and meadow on the highest ground of which the white Georgian house was situated. As we neared the house I shivered, not only with the cold, but with a

put me into a chair like my own which the Fenimores h

matter, Pard

hip will tell you, sir. Th

ther, Lady Fenimore. And both were crying. He rose as he saw me-a short, crop-haired, clean-shaven, ruddy, jockey-faced man of fifty-five, the corners of his thin lips, usually curled up in a cheery smile, now pi

old man," said Sir Anthony,

g it, what message it contained. I had known,

enant Oswald Fenimore, was killed in action yesterd

f years out of Sandhurst. Only a week before I had received an exuberant letter from him extolling his men as "super-devil-angels," an

buried with a little wooden cross with hi

ed out

r old A

is wife and wheeled me to her side, so

er hard, E

know. But a

in a quavering voice, "he died like a

e looked at

"I've only just time t

mmittee?

nt's. I promised t

Lady Fenimore lifte

going,

shirk his duty

ost poignant simulacrum of a smile I

can will keep me compa

ively than he had ever done in alien presenc

he burst into

lish," she said brokenly. "But I can'

y, too; for I loved the boy, and