were in Brussels in January after the Armistice. True, my husband was a Brigadier-General, but Brussels was full of them in those days. Like silver in the time of Solomon, they were of no account. Nevertheless, the Belgian War Office sent us all round the battlefields in a military car. Those battlefields ! I do not think many women saw them as early as I did-two months after the Armistice, when they were still untouched by God or man. I cannot describe them. Far abler pens than mine have done so many times already. I saw too much. In my mind it is all a confused jumble of mile after mile of desolation unspeakable. Wire, overturned tanks, broken aeroplanes, duckboard tracks, skeletons of horses, shell-holes, craters, and, pervading all, noisome mud, with unnameable horrors sticking up out of it. Ruins as at Ypres, or again at other places just a heap of stones, or perhaps only a nameboard, marked what had once been a village. Before I left Brussels the owner of the chateau of Langemark had asked me to look at her much-loved home, which she had not seen for four weary years, and to tell her how it looked, and whether it was much damaged by the war. I did see the chateau of Langemark. least I saw two or three battered stones and a huge crater full to the brim with mud and water which I was told was the chateau. I am glad I never saw the owner again. At And everywhere the little wooden crosses. The first little wooden cross I saw is my most vivid and unforgettable impression of the wonderful and yet dreadful two days I spent on the battlefields. It was just outside Courtrai, in a ditch; I stopped the car and got out, and knelt beside it. Private the Regiment. As I knelt I began to understand, as I had never understood during the whole four years of war, what war really meantwhat it had meant to Private what it had meant to me. There are some things too deep for tears or words. Dry-eyed and speechless, I went back to the car. Why had I not brought armfuls of flowers? Why could I not do something to show the dead the pitiful understanding that filled my heart. The little crosses came thick and fast after that-in the ditches, in the fields, on banks, everywhere. I longed to stop the car at each and every one. I hated motoring past. It seemed as if I did not care. But I did care, and "they" know it. Private is lying now in one of the big cemeteries that have since been made. But I shall see his cross for always in that ditch outside Courtrai. Nearly two years later I went through the battlefields again-this time by train, which crawled over the uneven railway track. Much had been done by nature as well as by the hand of man. It was a bright moonlight night. There had been a heavy fall of snow; everything was white, very, "Mon General, je me permets de recommander à votre bienveillance, Madame Cette dame, qui est une de nos amies, et un do not always object to a little None of these things would hit at England. mean move for you, but through it all your husband would remain as immovable, and I suppose as inscrutable, as the sphinx. For any man must become inscrutable, or at least look so, at the War Office. Think of the secrets they must know and keep. Why, some one must even know whether there will be any passages available for officers' wives to India or Timbuctoo next trooping season, and other similar things of fearful import to me. Some one possibly may even know whether or not there will be any Army at all next year. As to this last point, though, I do feel slightly reassured, since a well-known Labour member of Parliament I met the other day assured me that when they are in power they are not going to do away with the Army. His statement took a load off my mind. I should hate to join all the other demobilised officers and their wives who play barrel-organs in the streets, the only way I can think of at the moment by which we could earn a living. The fish trade and all its branches, from the great Mac Fisheries to watching over the muddy little fishes in the Nile, is the last refuge of the retired naval officer; but the Army has no such trade to fall back on. I loved this letter. Can you imagine a British Ambassador writing it, or making out my passport endorsed, "nationality none," as this kind friend also did! Imagine, too, the face of a British Commanderin-Chief on receiving such instructions. This other General seemed to take it all as a matter of course. Motor, aide-de-camp and flag were all forthcoming, and I did "execute my project i.e., join my husband. Of course the most delightful thing must be to have a husband at the War Office-to really belong to that sacred edifice, to be one of them, to know everything and everybody, to be able to say with assumed carelessness," My husband is at the War Office." To feel that Poland may become German or remain Polish, that Ireland may become a republic or merely remain a nuisance, that every railwayman and miner in England, Scotland, and Wales may be out on strike for all you care. Fish is the perquisite of the Navy. Perhaps meat is indicated for the Army, and its connection with butchers would surely please many of the Army Irish critics. A SHOOTING TRIP IN CHAMBA. BY F. L. FARRER. IT was the middle of one of the hottest of hot weathers at Agra. Coming out of the mess after luncheon I glanced at the thermometer in the verandah. It registered 110°. As I walked across to my bungalow a wave of fierce heat as from a furnace blast seemed to strike up at me; the merciless white glare seemed to draw one's eyes out of one's head; the air danced and vibrated in the scorching sunlight. Thank heaven, I thought to myself, I have only got two more weeks of this ordeal by fire and then leave -leave for two whole months. It was too hot to sleep or read or even think. The only thing to be done was to subside under a punkah and get somebody else to think for me. I summoned my familiar in the person of Amir Khan, my Mahommedan servant, to my side. "Talk about cool things,' I said. He took the cue at once. There was the pressing question of where the Sahib would spend his leave this year to be decided. Last year we had spent our leave in the jungles of the south. It was true we had had good sport and had escaped escaped malaria, thanks be Allah, but it would not be wise to tempt Fortune in that direction again. The Sahib had spoken of Kashmir and Baltistan, but to achieve anything great in those far hunting-grounds three months' leave at least were required, whereas we had only got two. Without a doubt the place to go to was Chamba. He had visited this glorious mountain land before with a previous master; he knew of a shikari whose name was a household word throughout the countryside. In ten days from starting we should be in the land of black bear, gural, and scrow; in a fortnight in the haunts of red bear and tahr. Then he launched forth into a glowing eulogy of this heaven upon earth-a country of rushing mountain streams and smiling sunlit valleys; of majestic snow-clad mountains and cool forests of deodar, oak, and pine; of grassy flower-bedecked upland meadows; of fresh lifegiving air from the eternal snows; of rhododendrons and wild strawberries; of apricot and walnut trees. He wound up his panegyric with the words: "It's God's own country." The man was a wizard. I had forgotten the heat. I was drinking in great draughts of pure mountain air. I could smell the delicious fragrant scent of the deodar forests. I could hear the muffled roar of snow-fed mountain torrents. I could see range upon range of forest-clad mountains sweep ing up to and losing themselves twenty years he had been in the eternal snows and conducting British officers on glaciers. "You speak words of shooting expeditions during the honeyed wisdom," I said. "We leave season, sometimes makwill start for Chamba this day ing two trips in the summer fortnight." Of all the decisions months. He had a wonderful I have made, I have never collection of chits, from which made a better. I gathered that others had as high an opinion of his attainments as I formed after two months of the most delightful hunting with him. I have met shikaris good, bad, and indifferent. A few there are, finished masters of their craft, who have made a high science of the art of hunting. Moula belonged to this category. These men, while giving full value to the possible eccentricities of individual animals and the hundred and one different factors which can never be disregarded, seem to work on a theory of probabilities, the result of the accumulated experience of years, which ultimately can hardly fail to crown their efforts with success. When they have the requisite intelligence to enable them to analyse their actions-there are many who act from instinct, and are unable to give an explanation of the considerations which govern them in making a decision-and are sufficiently generous to give one an insight into their craft, then there are few more fascinating companions. 66 We had rumbled over the Punjab and Sind Railway to Amritzar. We had jolted over the branch line that leads thence to Pathankote at the base of the foothills of the Himalayas. We had galloped in a tonga uphill and down dale to the accompaniment of rapid hoof-beats and the tuneful call of the horn echoing through the valleys as it gives the warning for change horses over the fifty odd miles of military road which separates the latter place from Dalhousie, perched picturesquely on its three mountainpeaks. From here onwards there are only pack-paths, and all baggage has to be carried either by pack - animals or coolies. My shikari, Moula, with his half-brother, Mardawar, who filled the joint rôle of understudy and gun-carrier, had come with a band of retainers from his village in the mountains to meet me and transport my baggage. I took a liking to the man at once. He turned out to be a firstrate shikari. As a boy he had been tiffin-coolie to that mighty hunter, Kinloch, for whom he had an unstinted admiration, regarding him almost in the light of a demigod. For |