who could afford a permanent memorial, their remoteness from posterity became less as the names became more legible, until one arrived at those who had watched the old timbered inn by the churchyard being burnt to the ground—was it forty years ago? I remembered Captain Huxtable telling me that the catastrophe was supposed to have been started by the flaring up of a pot of glue which a journeyman joiner had left on a fire while he went to the taproom for a mug of beer. The burning of the old Bull Inn had been quite a big event for the neighbourhood; but it wouldn’t be thought much of in these days; and my mind reverted to the demolished churches along the Western Front, and the sunlit inferno of the first day of the Somme Battle. There wouldn’t be much Gray’s Elegy atmosphere if Butley were in the Fourth Army area!
Gazing across at the old rifle butts—now a grassy indentation on the hillside half a mile away—I remembered the Volunteers whose torchlight march-past had made such a glowing impression on my nursery-window mind, in the good old days before the Boer War. Twenty years ago there had been an