had been faithful to their trust unto death. To those around him he spoke more than once in thankful appreciation of this good feeling of the people of France and Belgium. Especially was he pleased to see the children of the country-side crowd around him, and when little choirs of them sang “God Save the King” in quaintly accented words his feeling was manifest.

There came thus to the pilgrimage from the first an atmosphere of affectionate intimacy between these people who were not his subjects and the British King. They gathered around him as around a friend, the old women leaning forward to catch his words, the children trying to come close enough to touch him, seeing in his uniform again the “Tommy” who had proved such a gentle soul when he came for a brief rest from the horrors of the battle-field to the villages behind the line and helped “mother” with the housework and nursed the baby. At one village a gendarme, feeling in his official soul that this was really no way to treat a King, tried to arrange some more formal atmosphere. But in vain. The villagers saw the old friendly good-humoured British Army back in France, and could not be official.

Now and then at a cemetery the King met relatives, in some cases from far-off Pacific Dominions, visiting their dead, and he stopped to speak with them because they were on the same mission as he was, of gratitude and reverence. One mother, moved by the kindness of the King’s greeting, opened her heart to him and told, with the simple eloquence of real feeling, how she had just come from her son’s grave and was proud that he had died for his King and country; that every care had been taken to find and identify it, and “more could not have been done if it had been the Prince of Wales himself.”

At several points the workers of the Imperial War Graves Commission—practically all of whom had gone through the campaign, and now are reverently and carefully tending the last resting-places of their fallen comrades—assembled to greet the King. He spoke with them also, giving them thanks for their work and noting their war medals and asking them about their life in the camps, or with the mobile caravans which, in the districts where housing cannot yet be found, move from cemetery to cemetery, keeping fresh the tribute of grass and flowers and trees—caravans which bring back vividly one’s memory of the old British supply columns, for they are almost invariably led by a small self-important and well-fed dog.

When at Vlamertinghe—where are the graves of the first Dominion soldiers who fell in the war—the High Commissioner for Canada, the Hon. P. C. Larkin, was met visiting the Canadian graves there; the King gave him a very warm greeting. He showed that there is never absent from his mind the thought that in the greatest Ordeal of Battle which the British race has had to pass through, the children nations of his Empire came to the side of the Mother Country, with the instinctive spontaneity of the blood in a limb responding to a message from the heart; and that the crimson tie of kinship never broke nor slackened through all the perilous anxious years. Across the sea, held for them as a safe path by the Navy, the men of the Empire—and the women, too—kept passing at the King’s word to whatsoever point at which the peril was greatest, the work most exacting. The graves of the Flanders battle-fields told triumphantly of this august Imperial assembly—the dead of the Mother Country having around them those of India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Newfoundland, the West Indies, the Pacific Islands.[1] At every point the voices of the dead bespoke, in the King’s words, “the single-hearted assembly of nations and races which