is still the home of song; in the Casentino you can hear the rispetti and stornelli that Lorenzo de' Medici loved and imitated, and in Calabria and Sicily the shepherds pipe to their flocks as they did in the days of Theocritus. Et ego in Arcadia. . . . I have listened to Daphnis and Menalcas, and heard the song of La Nencia da Barbarino : "Io sono stato a Empoli al mercato, A Prato a Monticelli a San Casciano, Yet-painful confession of a Philistine in music-if I could hear those delightful airs again, they would recall the loveliness of Italy less than certain familiar tunes Strauss waltzes mainly-which were played in Rome on the road leading from the Trinità de' Monti to the Pincian by three blind musicians, who were led away at the end of the performance by a very hairy, dirty ruffian with a never-failing supply of jokes which always made them laugh. The Blue Danube' and 'Doctrinen' take me straight back to that incomparable city, with the sun setting behind St Peter's, and the pines and the ilexes and the twin towers of the Trinità all flushed with a heavenly roseate glow, the scent of flowers and warm earth, the throb and wheeze of violin, 'cello, and clarinet, and the pathetic group of musicians with their ever-cheerful oicerone. The blatant strains of 'Avanti Savoia ' and 'Santa Lucia,' at one time far too familiar, revive sharp memories of brilliant winter mornings in the Via Gregoriana, where they were played with immense brio on a kind of shawm by a young peasant from the Abruzzi, who was accompanied by a fierceeyed old man with a bagpipe which looked like a white pig, and emitted appropriate grunts and groans. The even more blatant Funiculi funicula' recalls, not the slightly frowsy splendour of Naples, but the serene greys and purples of evenings on Como, when its notes were poured forth incessantly from the passionate heart of a penny-in-the-slot organ in a fortunately distant osteria on the Punta d'Avedro. These are only a few instances of the sentimental advantages of being unmusical. When I read Dr Ethel Smyth's memoirs (one of the most delightful books ever written by any one, musician or otherwise), I was interested to observe that she shows no trace of possessing, or at any rate of exercising the faculty of romantic association with regard to her art; in spite of her intensely impressionable temperament, her sense of humour and her richly stored memory, she seems, like many musicians whom I have known, to keep an attitude to music that is absolute; to her, doubtless, it is keenly suggestive, not associative. I envy her all her gifts except this immunity from my own (in her opinion) ridiculous weakness; she will never know the e fatuous bliss of the duffer who attends concerts in order to wallow in sentimental memories, and bad music will merely make her cross. Higher joys -the highest-no doubt are hers; but, such being denied me, I cling to my base delights je bois dans mon verre. It will never, I trust, be empty; only a few evenings ago, in a Pall Mall club, a friend who is wise in such matters was talking to me about Spanish tunes, and happened to hum a few bars of a Castilian folk-song. Instantly the scene changed: the gaiters of the Bishop van ished; the portraits of the Eminent wavered and grew dim; the voice of the bald old gentleman wheezing hoarse chestnuts to a suffering friend died away. I was transported to a long low cellar that smelt of garlic and smoky lamps and was hung with dried gourds and hams and onions. again I heard the castanets and the guitar, and a woman's voice singing that fierce and passionate music; once again I saw the swarthy and savage beauty of La Magdelena,-but that is a reminiscence far too sacred for cold print. Once THROUGH ALL THE LAND DEBATABLE. BY LIEUT.-COLONEL P. R. BUTLER, D.S.O. WHEN, at the end of May, orders reached us in Cologne that we were to be sent to stop the fighting in Upper Silesia, everybody felt that we might be in for almost anything. The interposition, between two closely-confronted armies, of a relatively tiny British force was full of interesting possibilities. What an appeal to the imagination! A British battalion moving, complete in every detail, across the breadth of Germany, to restore peace to a remote province, and so discount one ill effect of Germany's war-British soldiers crossing the battlefield of Leipzig and the Elbe-and, in this particular case, the same soldiers who had gone the year before to Eastern Prussia, and unfurled en route their colours on the railway platform of Warsaw ! ing in the sunshine, and every here and there great clumps of cement factories, unfinishedlooking, but at work. The villages were apportioned between Poles and Germans in a way that was instructive. Along their main street the houses were inhabited by Germans; the poorer back streets were exclusively Pole-the influential minority Germans, the toiling majority Poles. These few preliminary days were spent in intensive training; but there were one or two rather amusing diversions, and among these must be reckoned the incident of the Polish marriage feast of Frauendorf. The companies were billeted in barns, which stood at the back of the living-houses. The entrance to one of the latter was seen, on our arrival, to be decked with a miniature evergreen triumphal arch, bearing an inscription of welcome and goodwill. These amenities turned out, however, to be intended, not for us, but for a happy couple that had just been wedded in the local church. It is impossible to keep the British soldier from fraternising with all and sundry wherever he goes, in spite of prohibitions ; and so it must be counted to the credit of the discipline of the particular company in question that, when the wed ding festivities were at their height, only one soldier found his way into the banquethall. He, however, was a tremendous success, sang an Irish song, and gave a finished exhibition of a clog - dance. Alas! the company sergeantmajor was for once deficient of a sense of humour, and Private O'Hara was brought up on report next morning for creating a disturbance in a civilian house!" On a Sunday afternoon, at the very end of May, the officers of the same battalion were seeking a little repose and some shelter from the merciless sun, in a small orchard. Valises were stretched under the trees, and those who were not reading were asleep. There were innumerable gnats about, and the distant booming of the guns was vaguely menacing. Suddenly the field-telephone rang. The battalion was to move by lorry at dawn. It was to get between the insurgent Poles and Germans, and keep them from from each other's throats. through the Polish lines. We conjectured that the French, advancing from another point through the German lines, had in their turn a splash of khaki on each of their camions. As the column rolled forward upon its three hours' journey to the front, the character of the country began to alter. The belts of forest became deeper, with now the sombreness of pines, now the clear shadiness of beech and birch. All along the route the people acclaimed us as their deliverers. To them, the tillers of the soil and the small trades-people of the villages, it signified little what label was theirs, or to whom they would have to pay their taxes. They only wanted to live in peace. One thought of France of 1914, when, as one sped onward in the troop-train towards the front, the old men working in the fields would wave their hats, and then draw an earthy forefinger across their gullets, pointing in the direction of the invader. Things were different now. After a time many of the once familiar signs of war's destructiveness began to show -pillaged houses, broken bridges, exploded cross-roads. And then, all of a sudden, the column came to a stop. The leading lorry had been held up by a trench and barricade across the road; and behind the barricade there stood a crowd of Poles, their rifles at the present. Practically everything that can now happen to one on of equipment, or portion of service has had its counter- what once might have been part, at one time or another, full dress. One man sported in an experience gone through a blue lancer cap, with a in the Great War. When, Norfolk jacket and grey flannel therefore, the writer saw what trousers; many wore bowlers, was holding up the column on with "field-grey "tunics. They this Upper Silesian road, his looked as though they had thoughts flew back to an inci- hurriedly clothed themselves dent which occurred in Salonika from the wardrobe of a rifled shortly after the British force provincial theatre. But their had landed there. A small arms seemed in good order, party of our troops was march- and their earthworks bristled ing along the Seres road for with machine-guns. Their dethe first time, when it was held meanour towards the British up by a Greek piquet. The troops was not unfriendly, excorporal in command of the cept for surly looks on the latter informed the British offi- part of some. They all looked cer that nobody was allowed very hungry. Our lorries thunalong that road. He said it dered on, and as they dipped with the air of a man deter- down into the valley wherein mined to die rather than betray lay Ujest-their destination, his trust. So the British party between the opposing armies just moved round off the road to one side, regaining it a few yards farther on. Both sides were completely satisfied. And here, in Silesia, very much the same thing happened. The lorry column, packed with its grinning men, wheeled off to the right, and, following a slight deviation, regained the road farther on, with nothing more unpleasant than some extra jolting. -a shell screamed overhead and burst beyond that village, by whom fired, and for whom intended, one would have been puzzled to say. The country in the west central portion of Upper Silesia might at first sight be thought merely undulating, and to consist entirely of alternate tracts of forest and corn-land. true that, save for the beautiful Annaberg, which rises to some 2000 feet from the level plain, it has no heights. But here It is We were now well within the zone of hostilities, and Polish irregular troops were dug in all along the road. There are and there it is seamed with degrees of irregularity, and unexpected valleys, which wind these irregulars-outwardly, at for miles, and in which nestle, any rate-were about as irregu- amid orchards and along the lar as any military body could banks of pellucid streams, tiny be. Scarcely any of them retiring villages. Such a place were completely in uniform, is Alt Ujest. but nearly all wore some article I shall always remember this |