The clouds had broken before the service ended with the sprinkling of Holy Water; and now between the shell-bursts, while we were yet busy planting, came strains of distant music, as thin and faint and valiant as the February sunshine. It was one of our British bands, perhaps at practice in some safe fold of the famous battle-field, more likely assisting at some ceremonial further away than I imagined; for they seemed to be playing very beautifully; and when they finished with 'Auld Lang Syne' they could not have hung more pathetically upon the closing bars if they had been playing at our graveside, for the boy who always loved a band.
Then there was his trench to see; but it was full of water where it had not fallen in, and was not like a trench any more. And the _estaminet_ at the cross-roads, that cruelly warm corner whence he passed into peace, it too had vanished from the earth. But the gentle slope that had been No-Man's Land was much as he must have seen it in anxious summer dawns, and under the stars that twinkled on so many of his breathless adventures in the early bombing days, when he pelted Germans in their own trench with his own hand, and thought it all 'a jaunt'; thought it 'just like throwing in from cover'; declared it 'as safe as going up to a man's front door-bell--pulling it--and running off again!'
Well, this was where he had played those safe games; and true enough, it was not by them he met his death, but standing-to down there under shell-fire, on a summer's morning after his own heart, with eyes like the summer sky turned towards the same line of trees my eyes were beholding now, his last thought for his men. I could almost hear his eager question:
Did I enter into the spirit of all that last chapter of his dear life the better for being on the scene, and watching shrapnel burst over it even as he had watched it a thousand times? I cannot say I did. I doubt if I could have entered into it more than I always had ... we were such friends. But how _he_ must be entering into the whole spirit of my whole pilgrimage! It was like so much of his old life and mine. Always he knew that he had only to call and I would come to him, at school or wherever he was; many a time I had jumped into a car and gone, though he never did call me in his life. _Had he now?_ ... There was my friend's car waiting, as it might have been once more in the lane opposite 'the old grey Chapel behind the trees.' ... And here were we passengers, a party from the four winds, all brought together by different agencies for the same simple end. Who had brought us? Who had prompted or inspired those directly responsible for our being there? It was not, you perceive, a case of one god from a machine, but of three at the very least. Who had so beautifully arranged the whole difficult thing?