Page:Wounded Souls.djvu/53

 piano in the dining-room—German, thank goodness—and Charles Fortune and I can really get down to some serious music."

"How's the war?" I asked.

"War?" he said, absent-mindedly. "Oh, yes, the war! That's going on all right. They'll be out of Tournai in a few days. Perhaps out of Maubeuge and Mons. Oh, the game's up! Very soon the Intellectuals will be looking round for a living in dear old London. My goodness, some of us will find peace a difficult job! I can see Boredom approaching with its colossal shadow After all, it has been a great game, on the whole."

I laughed, but something stuck in my throat. Colonel Lavington played the flute, but he knew his job, and was in touch with General Headquarters and all its secret information. It was obvious that he believed the war was going to end—soon. Soon, O Lord, after all the years of massacre.

I blurted out a straight question.

"Do you think there's a real chance of Peace?"

The Colonel was reading a piece of music, humming it with a la, la, la.

"Another month, and our job's done," he said. "Have you heard that bit of Gluck? It's delicious."

I stayed with him a little while and did not follow a note of his music. I was excited by the supreme hope he had given me. So there was to be an end of massacre, and my own hopes had not been false.

At the mess table that night, Charles Fortune was in good form. We sat in a room which was rather handsomely furnished, in a heavy way, with big bronzes on the mantelpiece (ticketed for exemption from requisition as family heirlooms), and even rather good portraits of a French family—from the eighteenth century onwards—on the panelled walls. The concierge had told us that