myself in the glass, speculating prosaically on the probabilities of my head of hair ever needing another trim up. A captain in the next chair had been through the whole repertoire—haircut, shave, shampoo, face-massage, and friction. “Now I feel a quid better,” he remarked when he got up to go. He was wearing trench-boots and was evidently on his way to the Line. I had heard him treating the barber, who spoke English, to a panegyric on the prospects of an Allied success in the Spring. “We’re going to give them the knock all right this journey!” The barber asked him about a long scar which seamed his head. He smiled, “A souvenir of Devil’s Wood.” I wondered how much longer he would retain his enthusiasm for the Western Front. Personally I preferred rambling around Rouen and pretending that I was an ordinary peacetime tourist. In the old quarters of the town one could stroll about without meeting many English soldiers.
Later on I was going to the Hôtel de la Poste for a valedictory bath and dinner. In the meantime I was content to stare at shopwindows and explore side streets. It was a Saturday afternoon and the people were busy marketing. At the end of my wanderings I went into the Cathedral, leaving behind me the bustling Square and the sallow gusty sunset which flared above the roofs. In the Cathedral, perhaps, I could escape from the War for a while, although the Christian Religion had apparently no claim to be regarded as a Benevolent Neutral Power.
It was some Saint’s Day, and the nave was crowded with drifting figures, their footfalls echoing in the dusk. Sometimes a chair scrooped when a worshipper moved away. Candles burned in clear clusters, like flickering gold flowers, in the shrines where kneeling women gazed and whispered and moved their hands devoutly. In the pulpit a priest was urging the Lenten significance of “Jésu,” tilting his pallid square face from side to side and gesticulating mechanically. A congregation sat or stood to hear him; among them, at my elbow, a small child stared up at the priest with stupid innocent eyes. That child couldn’t understand the sermon any