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It seemed strange that he, Tom Slade, should be strolling about this quaint, war-scarred village, which but a little while before had belonged to the Germans. Here and there in the streets he met sentinels and occasionally an airplane sailed overhead. How he envied the men in those airplanes!

"The Archies are getting too familiar," he grumbled. "I must put on more speed. Won't do for me to fail to return." About that time a breeze sprang up from the east and the skies cleared through a narrow Vista, showing a war-scarred belt of country below with a small town ahead; that is, toward the west.

Often at the pensive sunset hour, reclining in a crumbling bastion, has he tried to rehabilitate the past, and to summon from their lonely and forgotten graves upon the neighbouring battlefield, or in quiet church-yards, it may be, far beyond the sea, the groups of war-scarred veterans who once peopled the now desolate fort.

On July 28, 1915, Nancy was visited by a flock of Zeppelins and a number of bombs dropped which did considerable damage in that war-scarred city. Eleven or twelve persons were killed. During the night of July 29-30, 1915, a French aviator shelled a plant in Dornach, Alsace, where asphyxiating gas was being made.

No martial pomp was displayed around that humble bier and rough wooden box, which were all the ruined city could afford the body of her defender; but no burial rite could be more solemn than that hurried evening service performed by torchlight under the war-scarred roof of the Convent, as with tears and sighs were chanted the words 'Libera me Domine."

And there was one, Ackronnion, clothed with rags, on which was the dust of roads, and underneath the rags was war-scarred armour whereon were dints of blows; and when he stroked his harp and sang his song, in the gallery above maidens wept, and even old lords chamberlain whimpered among themselves and thereafter laughed through their tears and said: "It is easy to make old people weep and to bring idle tears from lazy girls; but he will not set a-weeping the Queen of the Woods."

But at every pitched battle, at every skirmish, at every single-handed conflict the younger man gained little by little, the older man lost step by step. The experience of age was gradually but inevitably giving way to the strength and enthusiasm of youth. Then one day they met face to face and alone the old war-scarred chief, the young battle-inspired brave.

During the war-scarred days of 1915, while nation was rising up against nation, there was founded in the city of Madras one of these international ventures in co-operation.

We had seen our numbers grow greater and our movement stronger in many lands and here and there the final triumph had already come.... Alas, those smiling, shining days seem now to have been an experience in some other incarnation, for the years which lie between are war-scarred and tortured and in 1920 there is not a human being in the world to whom life is quite the same as in 1913.... So we do not come smiling to Geneva as to Budapest."

Many of the airmen were French, many British, not a few Americans, inclusive of the Lafayette Escadrille, composed mainly of men from overseas. The early evening passed, the dark hours flitted by, and so came midnight with a long line of planes stretched far and wide over that war-scarred expanse.