“What are your principles?” she asked him. “Have you got any?” The young man looked at him and smiled.!

“How do you know that my being with him helps him?” asked Joan. He wrote her two days later from Ayr, giving her the name of his regiment, and again some six months later from Flanders. But there would have been no sense in her replying to that last.

“Oh, come,” struck in a youngster who was lying perfectly flat, face downwards on his bed: it was the position in which he could breathe easiest. He raised his head a couple of inches and twisted it round so as to get his mouth free. “It isn’t as bad as all that. Why, the Thirty-third swarmed into Fort Malmaison of their own accord, though ’twas like jumping into a boiling furnace, and held it for three days against pretty nearly a division. There weren’t a dozen of them left when we relieved them. They had no ammunition left. They’d just been filling up the gaps with their bodies. And they wouldn’t go back even then. We had to drag them away. ‘They shan’t pass,’ ‘They shan’t pass!’—that’s all they kept saying.” His voice had sunk to a thin whisper. “Wouldn’t that train of argument lead to nobody ever doing anything?” suggested Joan. Flossie was sceptical. “Why hasn’t it done it before?” she wanted to know. “Good Lord! There’s been enough of it.”