There is only one time when that unearthly landscape returns to itself again.  I suppose men and women lived in those valleys once; French farmers’ girls tugged home at dusk up that ghostly roadway slow-footed, reluctant cows; I dare say they even made love—­French lads and sweethearts—­down some long obliterated path beside those willow stumps where the German patrol sneaks nightly from shell-hole to shell-hole.  There comes an afternoon when the sky turns dull yellow-white like an old smoker’s beard, and before dusk the snowflakes begin to fall.  Far back the cursing drivers are dragging their jibbing horses past half-frozen shell-holes, which they can scarcely see.  And out there, where the freezing sentries keep watch over the fringe where civilisation grinds against the German—­out there under the tender white mantle, flickering pink and orange under the gun flashes—­out there for a few short hours the land which Kultur has defaced comes by its own.

CHAPTER XXX

THE GRASS BANK

France, December 10th.

The connection of Tamar the Hammerhead, who cut the Grass Bank out of the forest, with Timothy Gibbs, of Booligal, in New South Wales, may not be clear at first sight.  Tam’s beech forest covered two or three green hills in Gaul at the time when Caius Sulpicius, and his working party of the Tenth Legion, were laying down new paving stones on the big road from Amiens over the hill-tops.  The wagon carrying the military secretary to the Governor had bumped uncomfortably down that long slope the week before; and as the Tenth Legion was resting, its commanding officer received, two days later, an order to detail another fatigue party.  The big trees looked down on a string of private soldiers shouldering big square paving stones from a neighbouring dump, where the wagons stood, and fitting them carefully into the pavement, and—­and otherwise enjoying their rest.  Caius Sulpicius and his orderly officer stood watching them.  The orderly officer leant on his stick.  Caius had a piece of bread in one hand and a wedge of cheese in the other.  His forearm was black with grubbing amongst the paving stones.

“When the Tenth Legion gets a rest without some old brass helmet helping us to spend it,” he said with his mouth full, “I’ll begin to think the end of the war is coming.”

“Why didn’t it strike old Brassribs to make the inhabitants do a job of work occasionally?” he added presently.  “Now, in the old general’s time—­”

Far down on the edge of the forest, across two or three miles of rolling hills, a patch of orange earth, newly turned, caught the orderly officer’s eye.  One of the inhabitants was doing a job of work there, anyway.  Two days ago he had passed that way in a stroll after parade.  A mallet-headed man, his bare arm-muscles orange with mud, was piling up an earthen embankment on the hill-side.  A patch of