There was something soothing and appropriate in that lulling melody; it suited the exhausted men, all of them filthy and ragged, all of them at the door of death, all of them too oppressed with misery even to look upon the beloved faces of comrades they were shortly due to lose. It was easy to hum whilst thinking of their mothers, their villages, their boyhood in the vines and fields, the embrace of their fathers, the first kiss of an adored fiancée, the wedding of a sister. It was easy to sway almost indiscernibly to that tune and contemplate this island, the scene of so many drunken nights,
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