a country all commandeered and ransacked by the gathering hosts of war.  Always we went on foot.  At first there were other fugitives, but we did not mingle with them.  Some escaped northward, some were caught in the torrent of peasantry that swept along the main roads; many gave themselves into the hands of the soldiery and were sent northward.  Many of the men were impressed.  But we kept away from these things; we had brought no money to bribe a passage north, and I feared for my lady at the hands of these conscript crowds.  We had landed at Salerno, and we had been turned back from Cava, and we had tried to cross towards Taranto by a pass over Mount Alburno, but we had been driven back for want of food, and so we had come down among the marshes by Paestum, where those great temples stand alone.  I had some vague idea that by Paestum it might be possible to find a boat or something, and take once more to sea.  And there it was the battle overtook us.

“A sort of soul-blindness had me.  Plainly I could see that we were being hemmed in; that the great net of that giant Warfare had us in its toils.  Many times we had seen the levies that had come down from the north going to and fro, and had come upon them in the distance amidst the mountains making ways for the ammunition and preparing the mounting of the guns.  Once we fancied they had fired at us, taking us for spies—­at any rate a shot had gone shuddering over us.  Several times we had hidden in woods from hovering aeroplanes.

“But all these things do not matter now, these nights of flight and pain...  We were in an open place near those great temples at Paestum, at last, on a blank stony place dotted with spiky bushes, empty and desolate and so flat that a grove of eucalyptus far away showed to the feet of its stems.  How I can see it!  My lady was sitting down under a bush resting a little, for she was very weak and weary, and I was standing up watching to see if I could tell the distance of the firing that came and went.  They were still, you know, fighting far from each other, with these terrible new weapons that had never before been used:  guns that would carry beyond sight, and aeroplanes that would do——­What they would do no man could foretell.

“I knew that we were between the two armies, and that they drew together.  I knew we were in danger, and that we could not stop there and rest!

“Though all those things were in my mind, they were in the background.  They seemed to be affairs beyond our concern.  Chiefly, I was thinking of my lady.  An aching distress filled me.  For the first time she had owned herself beaten and had fallen a-weeping.  Behind me I could hear her sobbing, but I would not turn round to her because I knew she had need of weeping, and had held herself so far and so long for me.  It was well, I thought, that she would weep and rest, and then we would toil on again, for I had no inkling of the thing that hung so near.  Even now I can see her as she sat there, her lovely hair upon her shoulder, can mark again the deepening hollow of her cheek.