Life was good out of the line in that September of ’15. The land of France was full of beauty, with bronzed corn-stooks in the fields, and scarlet poppies in the grass, and a golden sunlight on old barns and on little white churches and in orchards heavy with fruit. It was good to go into the garden of a French château and pluck a rose and smell its sweetness, and think back to England, where other roses were blooming. England!⁠ ⁠… And in a few days⁠—who could say?⁠—perhaps eternal sleep somewhere near Lens.

Some officers of the Guards came into the garden of the little house where I lived at that time with other onlookers. It was an untidy garden, with a stretch of grass-plot too rough to be called a lawn, but with pleasant shade under the trees, and a potager with raspberries and currants on the bushes, and flowerbeds where red and white roses dropped their petals.