'I--I think it means the worst.'
Chicksands' gesture was one of despair.
Then they hurried away from the War Office together.
CHAPTER XV
It was afternoon at Mannering.
Elizabeth was walking home from the village through the park. Still
the same dry east-wind weather--very cold in the wind, very warm in
the sun. If the German offensive began while these fine days held,
they would have the luck of weather as we had never had it. Think of
the drenching rains and winds of the Passchendaele attack! In the
popular mind the notion of 'a German God' was taking actual concrete
shape. A huge and monstrous form, sitting on a German hill, plotting
with the Kaiser, and ordering the weather precisely as the Kaiser
wished--it was thus that English superstition, aided by Imperial
speeches and telegrams, began to be haunted.
Yet the world was still beautiful--the silvery stems of the trees,
the flitting of the birds, the violet carpets underfoot. On the
fighting line itself there was probably a new crop of poets, hymning
the Spring with Death for listener, as Julian Grenfell and Rupert
Brooke had hymned it, in that first year of the war that seems now
an eternity behind us.
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