Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent hyphenation and ellipses in the original have been preserved. The table of contents was added. 

 ONE MAN'S INITIATION--1917

 BY

 JOHN DOS PASSOS

 NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 1922

 TO THOSE WITH WHOM I SAW ROCKETS IN THE SKY A CERTAIN EVENING AT SUNSET ON THE ROAD FROM ERIZE-LA-PETITE TO ERIZE-LA-GRANDE. 

 Table of Contents

 Chapter I 9 Chapter II 17 Chapter III 22 Chapter IV 31 Chapter V 49 Chapter VI 64 Chapter VII 85 Chapter VIII 107 Chapter IX 109 Chapter X 125 Chapter XI 127

One Man's Initiation--1917

CHAPTER I

In the huge shed of the wharf, piled with crates and baggage, broken bygang-planks leading up to ships on either side, a band plays a tinsellyHawaiian tune; people are dancing in and out among the piles of trunksand boxes. There is a scattering of khaki uniforms, and many young menstand in groups laughing and talking in voices pitched shrill with cratesexcitement. In the brown light of the wharf, full of rows of yellowand barrels and sacks, full of racket of cranes, among which windsin and out the trivial lilt of the Hawaiian tune, there is a flutterof gay dresses and coloured hats of women, and white handkerchiefs. 

The booming reverberation of the ship's whistle drowns all other sound. 

After it the noise of farewells rises shrill. White handkerchiefs areagitated in the brown light of the shed. Ropes crack in pulleys as thegang-planks are raised. 

Again, at the pierhead, white handkerchiefs and cheering and a flutterof coloured dresses. On the wharf building a flag spreads exultinglyagainst the azure afternoon sky. 

Rosy yellow and drab purple, the buildings of New York slide togetherinto a pyramid above brown smudges of smoke standing out in the water, linked to the land by the dark curves of the bridges. 

In the fresh harbour wind comes now and then a salt-wafting breath offthe sea. 

Martin Howe stands in the stern that trembles with the vibrating pushof the screw. A boy standing beside him turns and asks in a tremulousvoice, "This your first time across?"

"Yes. . . . Yours?"

"Yes. . . . I never used to think that at nineteen I'd be crossing theAtlantic to go to a war in France. " The boy caught himself up suddenlyand blushed. Then swallowing a lump in his throat he said, "It ought tobe time to eat. "

 "_God help Kaiser Bill! O-o-o old Uncle Sam. He's got the cavalry, He's got the infantry He's got the artillery; And then by God we'll all go to Germany! God help Kaiser Bill!_"

The iron covers are clamped on the smoking-room windows, for no lightsmust show. So the air is dense with tobacco smoke and the reek of beerand champagne. In one corner they are playing poker with their coatsoff. All the chairs are full of sprawling young men who stamp their feetto the time, and bang their fists down so that the bottles dance on thetables. 

 "_God help Kaiser Bill. _"

Sky and sea are opal grey. Martin is stretched on the deck in the bow ofthe boat with an unopened book beside him. He has never been so happy inhis life. The future is nothing to him, the past is nothing to him. Allhis life is effaced in the grey languor of the sea, in the soft surge ofthe water about the ship's bow as she ploughs through the long swell, eastward. The tepid moisture of the Gulf Stream makes his clothes feeldamp and his hair stick together into curls that straggle over hisforehead. There are porpoises about, lazily tumbling in the swell, andflying-fish skim from one grey wave to another, and the bow rises andfalls gently in rhythm with the surging sing-song of the broken water. 

Martin has been asleep. As through infinite mists of greyness he looksback on the sharp hatreds and wringing desires of his life. Now a leafseems to have been turned and a new white page spread before him, cleanand unwritten on. At last things have come to pass. 

And very faintly, like music heard across the water in the evening, blurred into strange harmonies, his old watchwords echo a little in hismind. Like the red flame of the sunset setting fire to opal sea and sky, the old exaltation, the old flame that would consume to ashes all thelies in the world, the trumpet-blast under which the walls of Jerichowould fall down, stirs and broods in the womb of his grey lassitude. Thebow rises and falls gently in rhythm with the surging sing-song of thebroken water, as the steamer ploughs through the long swell of the GulfStream, eastward. 

"See that guy, the feller with the straw hat; he lost five hundreddollars at craps last night. "

"Some stakes. "

It is almost dark. Sea and sky are glowing claret colour, darkened to acold bluish-green to westward. In a corner of the deck a number of menare crowded in a circle, while one shakes the dice in his hand with astrange nervous quiver that ends in a snap of the fingers as the whitedice roll on the deck. 

"Seven up. "

From the smoking-room comes a sound of singing and glasses banged ontables. 

 "_Oh, we're bound for the Hamburg show, To see the elephant and the wild kangaroo, An' we'll all stick together In fair or foul weather, For we're going to see the damn show through!_"

On the settee a sallow young man is shaking the ice in a whisky-and-sodainto a nervous tinkle as he talks:

"There's nothing they can do against this new gas. . . . It just corrodesthe lungs as if they were rotten in a dead body. In the hospitals theyjust stand the poor devils up against a wall and let them die. They saytheir skin turns green and that it takes from five to seven days todie--five to seven days of slow choking. "

 * * * * *

"Oh, but I think it's so splendid of you"--she bared all her teeth, white and regular as those in a dentist's show-case, in a smile as shespoke--"to come over this way to help France. "

"Perhaps it's only curiosity, " muttered Martin. 

"Oh no. . . . You're too modest. . . . What I mean is that it's so splendid tohave understood the issues. . . . That's how I feel. I just told dad I'dhave to come and do my bit, as the English say. "

"What are you going to do?"

"Something in Paris. I don't know just what, but I'll certainly makemyself useful somehow. " She beamed at him provocatively. "Oh, if only Iwas a man, I'd have shouldered my gun the first day; indeed I would. "

"But the issues were hardly . . . Defined then, " ventured Martin. 

"They didn't need to be. I hate those brutes. I've always hated theGermans, their language, their country, everything about them. And nowthat they've done such frightful things . . . "

"I wonder if it's all true . . . "

"True! Oh, of course it's all true; and lots more that it hasn't beenpossible to print, that people have been ashamed to tell. "

"They've gone pretty far, " said Martin, laughing. 

"If there are any left alive after the war they ought to bechloroformed. . . . And really I don't think it's patriotic or humane totake the atrocities so lightly. . . . But really, you must excuse me if youthink me rude; I do get so excited and wrought up when I think of thosefrightful things. . . . I get quite beside myself; I'm sure you do too, inyour heart. . . . Any red-blooded person would. "

"Only I doubt . . . "

"But you're just playing into their hands if you do that. . . . Oh, dear, I'm quite beside myself, just thinking of it. " She raised a small glovedhand to her pink cheek in a gesture of horror, and settled herselfcomfortably in her deck chair. "Really, I oughtn't to talk about it. Ilose all self-control when I do. I hate them so it makes me quiteill. . . . The curs! The Huns! Let me tell you just one story. . . . I knowit'll make your blood boil. It's absolutely authentic, too. I heard itbefore I left New York from a girl who's really the best friend I haveon earth. She got it from a friend of hers who had got it directly froma little Belgian girl, poor little thing, who was in the convent at thetime. . . . Oh, I don't see why they ever take any prisoners; I'd kill themall like mad dogs. "

"What's the story?"

"Oh, I can't tell it. It upsets me too much. . . . No, that's silly, I'vegot to begin facing realities. . . . It was just when the Germans weretaking Bruges, the Uhlans broke into this convent. . . . But I think it wasin Louvain, not Bruges. . . . I have a wretched memory for names. . . . Well, they broke in, and took all those poor defenceless little girls . . . "

"There's the dinner-bell. "

"Oh, so it is. I must run and dress. I'll have to tell you later. . . . "

Through half-closed eyes, Martin watched the fluttering dress and thebacks of the neat little white shoes go jauntily down the deck. 

 * * * * *

The smoking-room again. Clink of glasses and chatter of confidentvoices. Two men talking over their glasses. 

"They tell me that Paris is some city. "

"The most immoral place in the world, before the war. Why, there arehouses there where . . . " his voice sank into a whisper. The other manburst into loud guffaws. 

"But the war's put an end to all that. They tell me that French peopleare regenerated, positively regenerated. "

"They say the lack of food's something awful, that you can't get asquare meal. They even eat horse. "

"Did you hear what those fellows were saying about that new gas? Soundsfrightful, don't it? I don't care a thing about bullets, but that kindo' gives me cold feet. . . . I don't give a damn about bullets, but thatgas . . . "

"That's why so many shoot their friends when they're gassed. . . . "

"Say, you two, how about a hand of poker?"

A champagne cork pops. 

"Jiminy, don't spill it all over me. "

"Where we goin', boys?"

 "_Oh we're going to the Hamburg show To see the elephant and the wild kangaroo, And we'll all stick together In fair or foul weather, For we're going to see the damn show through!_"

CHAPTER II

Before going to bed Martin had seen the lighthouses winking at the mouthof the Gironde, and had filled his lungs with the new, indefinablyscented wind coming off the land. The sound of screaming whistles oftug-boats awoke him. Feet were tramping on the deck above his head. Theshrill whine of a crane sounded in his ears and the throaty cry of menlifting something in unison. 

Through his port-hole in the yet colourless dawn he saw the reddishwater of a river with black-hulled sailing-boats on it and a few lankylittle steamers of a pattern he had never seen before. Again he breatheddeep of the new indefinable smell off the land. 

Once on deck in the cold air, he saw through the faint light a row ofhouses beyond the low wharf buildings, grey mellow houses of fourstoreys with tiled roofs and intricate ironwork balconies, withbalconies in which the ironwork had been carefully twisted by artisanslong ago dead into gracefully modulated curves and spirals. 

Some in uniform, some not, the ambulance men marched to the station, through the grey streets of Bordeaux. Once a woman opened a window andcrying, "Vive l'Amérique, " threw out a bunch of roses and daisies. Asthey were rounding a corner, a man with a frockcoat on ran up and puthis own hat on the head of one of the Americans who had none. In frontof the station, waiting for the train, they sat at the little tables ofcafés, lolling comfortably in the early morning sunlight, and drank beerand cognac. 

Small railway carriages into which they were crowded so that their kneeswere pressed tight together--and outside, slipping by, blue-greenfields, and poplars stalking out of the morning mist, and long drifts ofpoppies. Scarlet poppies, and cornflowers, and white daisies, and thered-tiled roofs and white walls of cottages, all against a background ofglaucous green fields and hedges. Tours, Poitiers, Orleans. In the namesof the stations rose old wars, until the floods of scarlet poppiesseemed the blood of fighting men slaughtered through all time. At last, in the gloaming, Paris, and, in crossing a bridge over the Seine, aglimpse of the two linked towers of Notre-Dame, rosy grey in the greymist up the river. 

 * * * * *

"Say, these women here get my goat. "

"How do you mean?"

"Well, I was at the Olympia with Johnson and that crowd. They justpester the life out of you there. I'd heard that Paris was immoral, butnothing like this. "

"It's the war. "

"But the Jane I went with . . . "

"Gee, these Frenchwomen are immoral. They say the war does it. "

"Can't be that. Nothing is more purifying than sacrifice. "

"A feller has to be mighty careful, they say. "

"Looks like every woman you saw walking on the street was a whore. Theycertainly are good-lookers though. "

"King and his gang are all being sent back to the States. "

"I'll be darned! They sure have been drunk ever since they got off thesteamer. "

"Raised hell in Maxim's last night. They tried to clean up the place andthe police came. They were all soused to the gills and tried to makeeverybody there sing the 'Star Spangled Banner. '"

"Damn fool business. "

 * * * * *

Martin Howe sat at a table on the sidewalk under the brown awning of arestaurant. Opposite in the last topaz-clear rays of the sun, thefoliage of the Jardin du Luxembourg shone bright green above deep alleysof bluish shadow. From the pavements in front of the mauve-colouredhouses rose little kiosks with advertisements in bright orange andvermilion and blue. In the middle of the triangle formed by the streetsand the garden was a round pool of jade water. Martin leaned back in hischair looking dreamily out through half-closed eyes, breathing deep nowand then of the musty scent of Paris, that mingled with the meltingfreshness of the wild strawberries on the plate before him. 

As he stared in front of him two figures crossed his field of vision. Awoman swathed in black crepe veils was helping a soldier to a seat atthe next table. He found himself staring in a face, a face that stillhad some of the chubbiness of boyhood. Between the pale-brown frightenedeyes, where the nose should have been, was a triangular black patch thatended in some mechanical contrivance with shiny little black metal rodsthat took the place of the jaw. He could not take his eyes from thesoldier's eyes, that were like those of a hurt animal, full of meekdismay. Someone plucked at Martin's arm, and he turned suddenly, fearfully. 

A bent old woman was offering him flowers with a jerky curtsey. 

"Just a rose, for good luck?"

"No, thank you. "

"It will bring you happiness. "

He took a couple of the reddest of the roses. 

"Do you understand the language of flowers?"

"No. "

"I shall teach you. . . . Thank you so much. . . . Thank you so much. "

She added a few large daisies to the red roses in his hand. 

"These will bring you love. . . . But another time I shall teach you thelanguage of flowers, the language of love. "

She curtseyed again, and began making her way jerkily down the sidewalk, jingling his silver in her hand. 

He stuck the roses and daisies in the belt of his uniform and sat withthe green flame of Chartreuse in a little glass before him, staring intothe gardens, where the foliage was becoming blue and lavender withevening, and the shadows darkened to grey-purple and black. Now and thenhe glanced furtively, with shame, at the man at the next table. When therestaurant closed he wandered through the unlighted streets towards theriver, listening to the laughs and conversations that bubbled like thesparkle in Burgundy through the purple summer night. 

But wherever he looked in the comradely faces of young men, in thebeckoning eyes of women, he saw the brown hurt eyes of the soldier, andthe triangular black patch where the nose should have been. 

CHAPTER III

At Epernay the station was wrecked; the corrugated tin of the roof hungin strips over the crumbled brick walls. 

"They say the Boches came over last night. They killed a lot ofpermissionaires. "

"That river's the Marne. "

"Gosh, is it? Let me get to the winder. "

The third-class car, joggling along on a flat wheel, was full of thesmell of sweat and sour wine. Outside, yellow-green and blue-green, crossed by long processions of poplars, aflame with vermilion andcarmine of poppies, the countryside slipped by. At a station where thetrain stopped on a siding, they could hear a faint hollow sound in thedistance: guns. 

 * * * * *

Croix de Guerre had been given out that day at the automobile park atChalons. There was an unusually big dinner at the wooden tables in thenarrow portable barracks, and during the last course the General passedthrough and drank a glass of champagne to the health of all present. Everybody had on his best uniform and sweated hugely in the narrow, airless building, from the wine and the champagne and the thick stew, thickly seasoned, that made the dinner's main course. 

"We are all one large family, " said the General from the end of thebarracks . . . "to France. "

That night the wail of a siren woke Martin suddenly and made him sit upin his bunk trembling, wondering where he was. Like the shriek of awoman in a nightmare, the wail of the siren rose and rose and thendropped in pitch and faded throbbingly out. 

"Don't flash a light there. It's Boche planes. "

Outside the night was cold, with a little light from a waned moon. 

"See the shrapnel!" someone cried. 

"The Boche has a Mercedes motor, " said someone else. "You can tell bythe sound of it. "

"They say one of their planes chased an ambulance ten miles along astraight road the other day, trying to get it with a machine-gun. Theman who was driving got away, but he had shell-shock afterwards. "

"Did he really?"

"Oh, I'm goin' to turn in. God, these French nights are cold!"

 * * * * *

The rain pattered hard with unfaltering determination on the roof of thelittle arbour. Martin lolled over the rough board table, resting hischin on his clasped hands, looking through the tinkling bead curtains ofthe rain towards the other end of the weed-grown garden, where, under acanvas shelter, the cooks were moving about in front of two blacksteaming cauldrons. Through the fresh scent of rain-beaten leaves came agreasy smell of soup. He was thinking of the jolly wedding-parties thatmust have drunk and danced in this garden before the war, of the loverswho must have sat in that very arbour, pressing sunburned cheek againstsunburned cheek, twining hands callous with work in the fields. A manbroke suddenly into the arbour behind Martin and stood flicking thewater off his uniform with his cap. His sand-coloured hair was wet andwas plastered in little spikes to his broad forehead, a forehead thatwas the entablature of a determined rock-hewn face. 

"Hello, " said Martin, twisting his head to look at the newcomer. "Yousection twenty-four?"

"Yes. . . . Ever read 'Alice in Wonderland'?" asked the wet man, sittingdown abruptly at the table. 

"Yes, indeed. "

"Doesn't this remind you of it?"

"What?"

"This war business. Why, I keep thinking I'm going to meet the rabbitwho put butter in his watch round every corner. "

"It was the best butter. "

"That's the hell of it. "

"When's your section leaving here?" asked Martin, picking up theconversation after a pause during which they'd both stared out into therain. They could hear almost constantly the grinding roar of camions onthe road behind the café and the slither of their wheels through themud-puddles where the road turned into the village. 

"How the devil should I know?"

"Somebody had dope this morning that we'd leave here for Soissonsto-morrow. " Martin's words tailed off into a convictionless mumble. 

"It surely is different than you'd pictured it, isn't it, now?"

They sat looking at each other while the big drops from the leaky roofsmacked on the table or splashed cold in their faces. 

"What do you think of all this, anyway?" said the wet man suddenly, lowering his voice stealthily. 

"I don't know. I never did expect it to be what we were taught tobelieve. . . . Things aren't. "

"But you can't have guessed that it was like this . . . Like Alice inWonderland, like an ill-intentioned Drury Lane pantomime, like all thedusty futility of Barnum and Bailey's Circus. "

"No, I thought it would be hair-raising, " said Martin. 

"Think, man, think of all the oceans of lies through all the ages thatmust have been necessary to make this possible! Think of this newparticular vintage of lies that has been so industriously pumped out ofthe press and the pulpit. Doesn't it stagger you?"

Martin nodded. 

"Why, lies are like a sticky juice overspreading the world, a living, growing flypaper to catch and gum the wings of every human soul. . . . Andthe little helpless buzzings of honest, liberal, kindly people, aren'tthey like the thin little noise flies make when they're caught?"

"I agree with you that the little thin noise is very silly, " saidMartin. 

 * * * * *

Martin slammed down the hood of the car and stood upright. A cold streamof rain ran down the sleeves of his slicker and dripped from his greasyhands. 

Infantry tramped by, the rain spattering with a cold glitter on greyhelmets, on gun-barrels, on the straps of equipment. Red sweating faces, drooping under the hard rims of helmets, turned to the ground with thestruggle with the weight of equipment; rows and patches of faces werethe only warmth in the desolation of putty-coloured mud and bowedmud-coloured bodies and dripping mud-coloured sky. In the coldcolourlessness they were delicate and feeble as the faces of children, rosy and soft under the splattering of mud and the shagginess ofunshaven beards. 

Martin rubbed the back of his hand against his face. His skin was likethat, too, soft as the petals of flowers, soft and warm amid all thisdead mud, amid all this hard mud-covered steel. 

He leant against the side of the car, his ears full of the heavyshuffle, of the jingle of equipment, of the splashing in puddles ofwater-soaked boots, and watched the endless rosy patches of faces movingby, the faces that drooped towards the dripping boots that rose andfell, churning into froth the soupy, putty-coloured mud of the road. 

 * * * * *

The schoolmaster's garden was full of late roses and marigolds, allparched and bleached by the thick layer of dust that was over them. Nextto the vine-covered trellis that cut the garden off from the road stooda green table and a few cane chairs. The schoolmaster, somethingcharmingly eighteenth-century about the cut of his breeches and thecalves of his legs in their thick woollen golf-stockings, led the way, abrown pitcher of wine in his hand. Martin Howe and the black-haired, brown-faced boy from New Orleans who was his car-mate followed him. Thencame a little grey woman in a pink knitted shawl, carrying a tray withglasses. 

"In the Verdunois our wine is not very good, " said the schoolmaster, bowing them into chairs. "It is thin and cold like the climate. To yourhealth, gentlemen. "

"To France. "

"To America. "

"And down with the Boches. "

In the pale yellow light that came from among the dark clouds thatpassed over the sky, the wine had the chilly gleam of yellow diamonds. 

"Ah, you should have seen that road in 1916, " said the schoolmaster, drawing a hand over his watery blue eyes. "That, you know, is the VoieSacrée, the sacred way that saved Verdun. All day, all day, a doubleline of camions went up, full of ammunition and ravitaillement and men. "

"Oh, the poor boys, we saw so many go up, " came the voice, dry as therustling of the wind in the vine-leaves, of the grey old woman who stoodleaning against the schoolmaster's chair, looking out through a gap inthe trellis at the rutted road so thick with dust, "and never have weseen one of them come back. "

"It was for France. "

"But this was a nice village before the war. From Verdun to Bar-le-Duc, the Courrier des Postes used to tell us, there was no such village, soclean and with such fine orchards. " The old woman leaned over theschoolmaster's shoulder, joining eagerly in the conversation. 

"Even now the fruit is very fine, " said Martin. 

"But you soldiers, you steal it all, " said the old woman, throwing outher arms. "You leave us nothing, nothing. "

"We don't begrudge it, " said the schoolmaster, "all we have is ourcountry's. "

"We shall starve then. . . . "

As she spoke the glasses on the table shook. With a roar of heavy wheelsand a grind of gears a camion went by. 

"O good God!" The old woman looked out on to the road with terror in herface, blinking her eyes in the thick dust. 

Roaring with heavy wheels, grinding with gears, throbbing with motors, camion after camion went by, slowly, stridently. The men packed into thecamions had broken through the canvas covers and leaned out, wavingtheir arms and shouting. 

"Oh, the poor children, " said the old woman, wringing her hands, hervoice lost in the roar and the shouting. 

"They should not destroy property that way, " said the schoolmaster. . . . "Last year it was dreadful. There were mutinies. "

Martin sat, his chair tilted back, his hands trembling, staring withcompressed lips at the men who jolted by on the strident, throbbingcamions. A word formed in his mind: tumbrils. 

In some trucks the men were drunk and singing, waving their bidons inthe air, shouting at people along the road, crying out all sorts ofthings: "Get to the front!" "Into the trenches with them!" "Down withthe war!" In others they sat quiet, faces corpse-like with dust. Throughthe gap in the trellis Martin stared at them, noting intelligent faces, beautiful faces, faces brutally gay, miserable faces like those ofsobbing drunkards. 

At last the convoy passed and the dust settled again on the rutted road. 

"Oh, the poor children!" said the old woman. "They know they are goingto death. "

They tried to hide their agitation. The schoolmaster poured out morewine. 

"Yes, " said Martin, "there are fine orchards on the hills round here. "

"You should be here when the plums are ripe, " said the schoolmaster. 

A tall bearded man, covered with dust to the eyelashes, in the uniformof a commandant, stepped into the garden. 

"My dear friends!" He shook hands with the schoolmaster and the oldwoman and saluted the two Americans. "I could not pass without stoppinga moment. We are going up to an attack. We have the honour to take thelead. "

"You will have a glass of wine, won't you?"

"With great pleasure. "

"Julie, fetch a bottle, you know which. . . . How is the morale?"

"Perfect. "

"I thought they looked a little discontented. "

"No. . . . It's always like that. . . . They were yelling at some gendarmes. If they strung up a couple it would serve them right, dirty beasts. "

"You soldiers are all one against the gendarmes. "

"Yes. We fight the enemy but we hate the gendarmes. " The commandantrubbed his hands, drank his wine and laughed. 

"Hah! There's the next convoy. I must go. "

"Good luck. "

The commandant shrugged his shoulders, clicked his heels together at thegarden gate, saluted, smiling, and was gone. 

Again the village street was full of the grinding roar and throb ofcamions, full of a frenzy of wheels and drunken shouting. 

"Give us a drink, you. "

"We're the train de luxe, we are. "

"Down with the war!"

And the old grey woman wrung her hands and said:

"Oh, the poor children, they know they are going to death!"

CHAPTER IV

Martin, rolled up in his bedroll on the floor of the empty hayloft, wokewith a start. 

"Say, Howe!" Tom Randolph, who lay next him, was pressing his hand. "Ithink I heard a shell go over. "

As he spoke there came a shrill, loudening whine, and an explosion thatshook the barn. A little dirt fell down on Martin's face. 

"Say, fellers, that was damn near, " came a voice from the floor of thebarn. 

"We'd better go over to the quarry. "

"Oh, hell, I was sound asleep!"

A vicious shriek overhead and a shaking snort of explosion. 

"Gee, that was in the house behind us. . . . "

"I smell gas. "

"Ye damn fool, it's carbide. "

"One of the Frenchmen said it was gas. "

"All right, fellers, put on your masks. "

Outside there was a sickly rough smell in the air that mingled strangelywith the perfume of the cool night, musical with the gurgling of thestream through the little valley where their barn was. They crouched ina quarry by the roadside, a straggling, half-naked group, and watchedthe flashes in the sky northward, where artillery along the lines keptup a continuous hammering drumbeat. Over their heads shells shrieked attwo-minute intervals, to explode with a rattling ripping sound in thevillage on the other side of the valley. 

"Damn foolishness, " muttered Tom Randolph in his rich Southern voice. "Why don't those damn gunners go to sleep and let us go to sleep?. . . They must be tired like we are. "

A shell burst in a house on the crest of the hill opposite, so that theysaw the flash against the starry night sky. In the silence thatfollowed, the moaning shriek of a man came faintly across the valley. 

 * * * * *

Martin sat on the steps of the dugout, looking up the shattered shaft ofa tree, from the top of which a few ribbons of bark fluttered againstthe mauve evening sky. In the quiet he could hear the voices of menchatting in the dark below him, and a sound of someone whistling as heworked. Now and then, like some ungainly bird, a high calibre shelltrundled through the air overhead; after its noise had completely diedaway would come the thud of the explosion. It was like battledore andshuttlecock, these huge masses whirling through the evening far abovehis head, now from one side, now from the other. It gave him somehow acosy feeling of safety, as if he were under some sort of a bridge overwhich freight-cars were shunted madly to and fro. 

The doctor in charge of the post came up and sat beside Martin. He was asmall brown man with slim black moustaches that curved like the horns ofa long-horn steer. He stood on tip-toe on the top step and peered aboutin every direction with an air of ownership, then sat down again andbegan talking briskly. 

"We are exactly four hundred and five mètres from the Boche. . . . Fivehundred mètres from here they are drinking beer and saying, 'Hoch derKaiser. '"

"About as much as we're saying 'Vive la République', I should say. "

"Who knows? But it is quiet here, isn't it? It's quieter here than inParis. "

"The sky is very beautiful to-night. "

"They say they're shelling the Etat-Major to-day. Damned embusqués;it'll do them good to get a bit of their own medicine. "

Martin did not answer. He was crossing in his mind the four hundred andfive mètres to the first Boche listening-post. Next beyond the abris wasthe latrine from which a puff of wind brought now and then a nauseousstench. Then there was the tin roof, crumpled as if by a hand, that hadbeen a cook shack. That was just behind the second line trenches thatzig-zagged in and out of great abscesses of wet, upturned clay along thecrest of a little hill. The other day he had been there, and hadclambered up the oily clay where the boyau had caved in, and from thelevel of the ground had looked for an anxious minute or two at thetangle of trenches and pitted gangrened soil in the direction of theGerman outposts. And all along these random gashes in the mucky claywere men, feet and legs huge from clotting after clotting of clay, menwith greyish-green faces scarred by lines of strain and fear and boredomas the hillside was scarred out of all semblance by the trenches and theshell-holes. 

"We are well off here, " said the doctor again. "I have not had a seriouscase all day. "

"Up in the front line there's a place where they've planted rhubarb. . . . You know, where the hillside is beginning to get rocky. "

"It was the Boche who did that. . . . We took that slope from them twomonths ago. . . . How does it grow?"

"They say the gas makes the leaves shrivel, " said Martin, laughing. 

He looked long at the little ranks of clouds that had begun to fill thesky, like ruffles on a woman's dress. Might not it really be, he keptasking himself, that the sky was a beneficent goddess who would stoopgently out of the infinite spaces and lift him to her breast, where hecould lie amid the amber-fringed ruffles of cloud and look curiouslydown at the spinning ball of the earth? It might have beauty if he werefar enough away to clear his nostrils of the stench of pain. 

"It is funny, " said the little doctor suddenly, "to think how muchnearer we are, in state of mind, in everything, to the Germans than toanyone else. "

"You mean that the soldiers in the trenches are all further from thepeople at home than from each other, no matter what side they are on. "

The little doctor nodded. 

"God, it's so stupid! Why can't we go over and talk to them? Nobody'sfighting about anything. . . . God, it's so hideously stupid!" criedMartin, suddenly carried away, helpless in the flood of his passionaterevolt. 

"Life is stupid, " said the little doctor sententiously. 

Suddenly from the lines came a splutter of machine-guns. 

"Evensong!" cried the little doctor. "Ah, but here's business. You'dbetter get your car ready, my friend. "

The brancardiers set the stretcher down at the top of the steps that ledto the door of the dugout, so that Martin found himself looking into thelean, sensitive face, stained a little with blood about the mouth, ofthe wounded man. His eyes followed along the shapeless bundles ofblood-flecked uniform till they suddenly turned away. Where the middleof the man had been, where had been the curved belly and the genitals, where the thighs had joined with a strong swerving of muscles to thetrunk, was a depression, a hollow pool of blood, that glinted a littlein the cold diffusion of grey light from the west. 

 * * * * *

The rain beat hard on the window-panes of the little room and hisseddown the chimney into the smouldering fire that sent up thick greensmoke. At a plain oak table before the fireplace sat Martin Howe and TomRandolph, Tom Randolph with his sunburned hands with their dirty nailsspread flat and his head resting on the table between them, so thatMartin could see the stiff black hair on top of his head and the darknape of his neck going into shadow under the collar of the flannelshirt. 

"Oh, God, it's too damned absurd! An arrangement for mutual suicide andno damned other thing, " said Randolph, raising his head. 

"A certain jolly asinine grotesqueness, though. I mean, if you were Godand could look at it like that . . . Oh, Randy, why do they enjoy hatredso?"

"A question of taste . . . As the lady said when she kissed the cow. "

"But it isn't. It isn't natural for people to hate that way, it can'tbe. It even disgusts the perfectly stupid damn-fool people, likeHiggins, who believes that the Bible was written in God's ownhandwriting and that the newspapers tell the truth. "

"It makes me sick at ma stomach, Howe, to talk to one of thosehun-hatin' women, if they're male or female. "

"It is a stupid affair, _la vie_, as the doctor at P. 1. Saidyesterday. . . . "

"Hell, yes. . . . "

They sat silent, watching the rain beat on the window, and run down insparkling finger-like streams. 

"What I can't get over is these Frenchwomen. " Randolph threw back hishead and laughed. "They're so bloody frank. Did I tell you about whathappened to me at that last village on the Verdun road?"

"No. "

"I was lyin' down for a nap under a plum-tree, a wonderfully nice placenear a li'l brook an' all, an' suddenly that crazy Jane . . . You know theone that used to throw stones at us out of that broken-down house at thecorner of the road. . . . Anyway, she comes up to me with a funny look inher eyes an' starts makin' love to me. I had a regular wrastlin' matchgettin' away from her. "

"Funny position for you to be in, getting away from a woman. "

"But doesn't that strike you funny? Why down where I come from a drunkenmulatto woman wouldn't act like that. They all keep up a fake of notwantin' your attentions. " His black eyes sparkled, and he laughed hisdeep ringing laugh, that made the withered woman smile as she set anomelette before them. 

"Voilà, messieurs, " she said with a grand air, as if it were a boar'shead that she was serving. 

Three French infantrymen came into the café, shaking the rain off theirshoulders. 

"Nothing to drink but champagne at four francs fifty, " shouted Howe. "Dirty night out, isn't it?"

"We'll drink that, then!"

Howe and Randolph moved up and they all sat at the same table. 

"Fortune of war?"

"Oh, the war, what do you think of the war?" cried Martin. 

"What do you think of the peste? You think about saving your skin. "

"What's amusing about us is that we three have all saved our skinstogether, " said one of the Frenchmen. 

"Yes. We are of the same class, " said another, holding up his thumb. "Mobilised same day. " He held up his first finger. "Same company. " Heheld up a second finger. "Wounded by the same shell. . . . Evacuated to thesame hospital. Convalescence at same time. . . . Réformé to the same depôtbehind the lines. "

"Didn't all marry the same girl, did you, to make it complete?" askedRandolph. 

They all shouted with laughter until the glasses along the bar rang. 

"You must be Athos, Porthos, and d'Artagnan. "

"We are, " they shouted. 

"Some more champagne, madame, for the three musketeers, " sang Randolphin a sort of operatic yodle. 

"All I have left is this, " said the withered woman, setting a bottledown on the table. 

"Is that poison?"

"It's cognac, it's very good cognac, " said the old woman seriously. 

"C'est du cognac! Vive le roi cognac!" everybody shouted. 

 "_Au plein de mon cognac Qu'il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon, Au plein de mon cognac Qu'il fait bon dormir. _"

"Down with the war! Who can sing the 'Internationale'?"

"Not so much noise, I beg you, gentlemen, " came the withered woman'swhining voice. "It's after hours. Last week I was fined. Next time I'llbe closed up. "

The night was black when Martin and Randolph, after lengthy andelaborate farewells, started down the muddy road towards the hospital. They staggered along the slippery footpath beside the road, splashedevery instant with mud by camions, huge and dark, that roared grindinglyby. They ran and skipped arm-in-arm and shouted at the top of theirlungs:

 "_Auprès de ma blonde, Qu'il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon, Auprès de ma blonde, Qu'il fait bon dormir. _"

A stench of sweat and filth and formaldehyde caught them by the throatas they went into the hospital tent, gave them a sense of feverishbodies of men stretched all about them, stirring in pain. 

 * * * * *

"A car for la Bassée, Ambulance 4, " said the orderly. 

Howe got himself up off the hospital stretcher, shoving his flannelshirt back into his breeches, put on his coat and belt and felt his wayto the door, stumbling over the legs of sleeping brancardiers as hewent. Men swore in their sleep and turned over heavily. At the door hewaited a minute, then shouted:

"Coming, Tom?"

"Too damn sleepy, " came Randolph's voice from under a blanket. 

"I've got cigarettes, Tom. I'll smoke 'em all up if you don't come. "

"All right, I'll come. "

"Less noise, name of God!" cried a man, sitting up on his stretcher. 

After the hospital, smelling of chloride and blankets and reekingclothes, the night air was unbelievably sweet. Like a gilt fringe on adark shawl, a little band of brightness had appeared in the east. 

"Some dawn, Howe, ain't it?"

As they were going off, their motor chugging regularly, an orderly said:

"It's a special case. Go for orders to the commandant. "

Colours formed gradually out of chaotic grey as the day brightened. Atthe dressing-station an attendant ran up to the car. 

"Oh, you're for the special case? Have you anything to tie a man with?"

"No, why?"

"It's nothing. He just tried to stab the sergeant-major. "

The attendant raised a fist and tapped on his head as if knocking on adoor. "It's nothing. He's quieter now. "

"What caused it?"

"Who knows? There is so much. . . . He says he must kill everyone. . . . "

"Are you ready?"

A lieutenant of the medical corps came to the door and looked out. Hesmiled reassuringly at Martin Howe. "He's not violent any more. Andwe'll send two guardians. "

A sergeant came out with a little packet which he handed to Martin. 

"That's his. Will you give it to them at the hospital at Fourreaux? Andhere's his knife. They can give it back to him when he gets better. Hehas an idea he ought to kill everyone he sees. . . . Funny idea. "

The sun had risen and shone gold across the broad rolling lands, so thatthe hedges and the poplar-rows cast long blue shadows over the fields. The man, with a guardian on either side of him who cast nervous glancesto the right and to the left, came placidly, eyes straight in front ofhim, out of the dark interior of the dressing-station. He was a smallman with moustaches and small, good-natured lips puffed into an o-shape. At the car he turned and saluted. 

"Good-bye, my lieutenant. Thank you for your kindness, " he said. 

"Good-bye, old chap, " said the lieutenant. 

The little man stood up in the car, looking about him anxiously. 

"I've lost my knife. Where's my knife?"

The guards got in behind him with a nervous, sheepish air. They answeredreassuringly, "The driver's got it. The American's got it. "

"Good. "

The orderly jumped on the seat with the two Americans to show the way. He whispered in Martin's ear:

"He's crazy. He says that to stop the war you must kill everybody, killeverybody. "

 * * * * *

In an open valley that sloped between hills covered with beech-woods, stood the tall abbey, a Gothic nave and apse with beautifully tracedwindows, with the ruin of a very ancient chapel on one side, andcrossing the back, a well-proportioned Renaissance building that hadbeen a dormitory. The first time that Martin saw the abbey, it toweredin ghostly perfection above a low veil of mist that made the valley seema lake in the shining moonlight. The lines were perfectly quiet, andwhen he stopped the motor of his ambulance, he could hear the windrustling among the beech-woods. Except for the dirty smell of huddledsoldiers that came now and then in drifts along with the coolwood-scents, there might have been no war at all. In the soft moonlightthe great traceried windows and the buttresses and the high-pitched roofseemed as gorgeously untroubled by decay as if the carvings on the cuspsand arches had just come from under the careful chisels of the Gothicworkmen. 

"And you say we've progressed, " he whispered to Tom Randolph. 

"God, it is fine. "

They wandered up and down the road a long time, silently, looking at thetall apse of the abbey, breathing the cool night air, moist with mist, in which now and then was the huddled, troubling smell of soldiers. Atlast the moon, huge and swollen with gold, set behind the wooded hills, and they went back to the car, where they rolled up in their blanketsand went to sleep. 

Behind the square lantern that rose over the crossing, there was a trapdoor in the broken tile roof, from which you could climb to theobservation post in the lantern. Here, half on the roof and half on theplatform behind the trap-door, Martin would spend the long summerafternoons when there was no call for the ambulance, looking at theGothic windows of the lantern and the blue sky beyond, where huge softclouds passed slowly over, darkening the green of the woods and of theweed-grown fields of the valley with their moving shadows. 

There was almost no activity on that part of the front. A couple oftimes a day a few snapping discharges would come from the seventy-fivesof the battery behind the Abbey, and the woods would resound like ashaken harp as the shells passed over to explode on the crest of thehill that blocked the end of the valley where the Boches were. 

Martin would sit and dream of the quiet lives the monks must have passedin their beautiful abbey so far away in the Forest of the Argonne, digging and planting in the rich lands of the valley, making flowersbloom in the garden, of which traces remained in the huge beds ofsunflowers and orange marigolds that bloomed along the walls of thedormitory. In a room in the top of the house he had found a few tornremnants of books; there must have been a library in the old days, rowsand rows of musty-smelling volumes in rich brown calf worn by use to avelvet softness, and in cream-coloured parchment where the finger-marksof generations showed brown; huge psalters with notes and chantsilluminated in green and ultramarine and gold; manuscripts out of theMiddle Ages with strange script and pictures in pure vivid colours;lives of saints, thoughts polished by years of quiet meditation of olddivines; old romances of chivalry; tales of blood and death and lovewhere the crude agony of life was seen through a dawn-like mist ofgentle beauty. 

"God! if there were somewhere nowadays where you could flee from allthis stupidity, from all this cant of governments, and this hideousreiteration of hatred, this strangling hatred . . . " he would say tohimself, and see himself working in the fields, copying parchments inquaint letterings, drowsing his feverish desires to calm in thedeep-throated passionate chanting of the endless offices of the Church. 

One afternoon towards evening as he lay on the tiled roof with his shirtopen so that the sun warmed his throat and chest, half asleep in thebeauty of the building and of the woods and the clouds that driftedoverhead, he heard a strain from the organ in the church: a few deepnotes in broken rhythm that filled him with wonder, as if he hadsuddenly been transported back to the quiet days of the monks. Therhythm changed in an instant, and through the squeakiness of shatteredpipes came a swirl of fake-oriental ragtime that resounded like mockinglaughter in the old vaults and arches. He went down into the church andfound Tom Randolph playing on the little organ, pumping desperately withhis feet. 

"Hello! Impiety I call it; putting your lustful tunes into that piousold organ. "

"I bet the ole monks had a merry time, lecherous ole devils, " said Tom, playing away. 

"If there were monasteries nowadays, " said Martin, "I think I'd go intoone. "

"But there are. I'll end up in one, most like, if they don't put me injail first. I reckon every living soul would be a candidate for eitherone if it'd get them out of this God-damned war. "

There was a shriek overhead that reverberated strangely in the vaults ofthe church and made the swallows nesting there fly in and out throughthe glassless windows. Tom Randolph stopped on a wild chord. 

"Guess they don't like me playin'. "

"That one didn't explode though. "

"That one did, by gorry, " said Randolph, getting up off the floor, wherehe had thrown himself automatically. A shower of tiles came rattling offthe roof, and through the noise could be heard the frightened squeakingof the swallows. 

"I am afraid that winged somebody. "

"They must have got wind of the ammunition dump in the cellar. "

"Hell of a place to put a dressing-station--over an ammunition dump!"

The whitewashed room used as a dressing-station had a smell of bloodstronger than the chloride. A doctor was leaning over a stretcher onwhich Martin caught a glimpse of two naked legs with flecks of blood onthe white skin, as he passed through on his way to the car. 

"Three stretcher-cases for Les Islettes. Very softly, " said theattendant, handing him the papers. 

Jolting over the shell-pitted road, the car wound slowly throughunploughed weed-grown fields. At every jolt came a rasping groan fromthe wounded men. 

As they came back towards the front posts again, they found all thebatteries along the road firing. The air was a chaos of explosions thatjabbed viciously into their ears, above the reassuring purr of themotor. Nearly to the abbey a soldier stopped them. 

"Put the car behind the trees and get into a dugout. They're shellingthe abbey. "

As he spoke a whining shriek grew suddenly loud over their heads. Thesoldier threw himself flat in the muddy road. The explosion broughtgravel about their ears and made a curious smell of almonds. 

Crowded in the door of the dugout in the hill opposite they watched theabbey as shell after shell tore through the roof or exploded in thestrong buttresses of the apse. Dust rose high above the roof and filledthe air with an odour of damp tiles and plaster. The woods resounded ina jangling tremor, with the batteries that started firing one after theother. 

"God, I hate them for that!" said Randolph between his teeth. 

"What do you want? It's an observation post. "

"I know, but damn it!"

There was a series of explosions; a shell fragment whizzed past theirheads. 

"It's not safe there. You'd better come in all the way, " someone shoutedfrom within the dugout. 

"I want to see; damn it. . . . I'm goin' to stay and see it out, Howe. Thatplace meant a hell of a lot to me. " Randolph blushed as he spoke. 

Another bunch of shells crashing so near together they did not hear thescream. When the cloud of dust blew away, they saw that the lantern hadfallen in on the roof of the apse, leaving only one wall and the traceryof a window, of which the shattered carving stood out cream-whiteagainst the reddish evening sky. 

There was a lull in the firing. A few swallows still wheeled about thewalls, giving shrill little cries. 

They saw the flash of a shell against the sky as it exploded in the partof the tall roof that still remained. The roof crumpled and fell in, andagain dust hid the abbey. 

"Oh, I hate this!" said Tom Randolph. "But the question is, what'shappened to our grub? The popote is buried four feet deep in Gothicart. . . . Damn fool idea, putting a dressing-station over an ammunitiondump. "

"Is the car hit?" The orderly came up to them. 

"Don't think so. "

"Good. Four stretcher-cases for 42 at once. "

 * * * * *

At night in a dugout. Five men playing cards about a lamp-flame thatblows from one side to the other in the gusty wind that puffs every nowand then down the mouth of the dugout and whirls round it like somethingalive trying to beat a way out. 

Each time the lamp blows the shadows of the five heads writhe upon thecorrugated tin ceiling. In the distance, like kettle-drums beaten for adance, a constant reverberation of guns. 

Martin Howe, stretched out in the straw of one of the bunks, watchestheir faces in the flickering shadows. He wishes he had the patience toplay too. No, perhaps it is better to look on; it would be so silly tobe killed in the middle of one of those grand gestures one makes inslamming the card down that takes the trick. Suddenly he thinks of allthe lives that must, in these last three years, have ended in that grandgesture. It is too silly. He seems to see their poor lacerated souls, clutching their greasy dog-eared cards, climb to a squalid Valhalla, andthere, in tobacco-stinking, sweat-stinking rooms, like those of thelittle cafés behind the lines, sit in groups of five, shuffling, dealing, taking tricks, always with the same slam of the cards on thetable, pausing now and then to scratch their louse-eaten flesh. 

At this moment, how many men, in all the long Golgotha that stretchesfrom Belfort to the sea, must be trying to cheat their boredom and theirmisery with that grand gesture of slamming the cards down to take atrick, while in their ears, like tom-toms, pounds the death-dance of theguns. 

Martin lies on his back looking up at the curved corrugated ceiling ofthe dugout, where the shadows of the five heads writhe in fantasticshapes. Is it death they are playing, that they are so merry when theytake a trick?

CHAPTER V

The three planes gleamed like mica in the intense blue of the sky. Roundabout the shrapnel burst in little puffs like cotton-wool. A shout wentup from the soldiers who stood in groups in the street of the ruinedtown. A whistle split the air, followed by a rending snort that tailedoff into the moaning of a wounded man. 

"By damn, they're nervy. They dropped a bomb. "

"I should say they did. "

"The dirty bastards, to get a fellow who's going on permission. Now ifthey beaded you on the way back you wouldn't care. "

In the sky an escadrille of French planes had appeared and the threeGerman specks had vanished, followed by a trail of little puffs ofshrapnel. The indigo dome of the afternoon sky was full of a distantsnoring of motors. 

The train screamed outside the station and the permissionaires ran forthe platform, their packed musettes bouncing at their hips. 

 * * * * *

The dark boulevards, with here and there a blue lamp lighting up a benchand a few tree-trunks, or a faint glow from inside a closed café where aboy in shirt-sleeves is sweeping the floor. Crowds of soldiers, Belgians, Americans, Canadians, civilians with canes and straw hats andwell-dressed women on their arms, shop-girls in twos and threes laughingwith shrill, merry voices; and everywhere girls of the street, gigglingalluringly in hoarse, dissipated tones, clutching the arms of drunkensoldiers, tilting themselves temptingly in men's way as they walk along. Cigarettes and cigars make spots of reddish light, and now and then amatch lighted makes a man's face stand out in yellow relief and glintsred in the eyes of people round about. 

Drunk with their freedom, with the jangle of voices, with the rustle oftrees in the faint light, with the scents of women's hair and cheapperfumes, Howe and Randolph stroll along slowly, down one side to theshadowy columns of the Madeleine, where a few flower-women still offerroses, scenting the darkness, then back again past the Opéra towards thePorte St. Martin, lingering to look in the offered faces of women, tolisten to snatches of talk, to chatter laughingly with girls who squeezetheir arms with impatience. 

"I'm goin' to find the prettiest girl in Paris, and then you'll see thedust fly, Howe, old man. "

 * * * * *

The hors d'oeuvre came on a circular three-tiered stand; red strips ofherrings and silver anchovies, salads where green peas and bits ofcarrot lurked under golden layers of sauce, sliced tomatoes, potatosalad green-specked with parsley, hard-boiled eggs barely visible underthickness of vermilion-tinged dressing, olives, radishes, discs ofsausage of many different forms and colours, complicated bundles ofspiced salt fish, and, forming the apex, a fat terra-cotta jar of patéde foie gras. Howe poured out pale-coloured Chablis. 

"I used to think that down home was the only place they knew how tolive, but oh, boy . . . " said Tom Randolph, breaking a little loaf ofbread that made a merry crackling sound. 

"It's worth starving to death on singe and pinard for four months. "

After the hors d'oeuvre had been taken away, leaving themRabelaisianly gay, with a joyous sense of orgy, came sole hidden in acream-coloured sauce with mussels in it. 

"After the war, Howe, ole man, let's riot all over Europe; I'm getting ataste for this sort of livin'. "

"You can play the fiddle, can't you, Tom?"

"Enough to scrape out _Auprès de ma blonde_ on a bet. "

"Then we'll wander about and you can support me. . . . Or else I'll dressas a monkey and you can fiddle and I'll gather the pennies. "

"By gum, that'd be great sport. "

"Look, we must have some red wine with the veal. "

"Let's have Macon. "

"All the same to me as long as there's plenty of it. "

Their round table with its white cloth and its bottles of wine and itspiles of ravished artichoke leaves was the centre of a noisy, fantasticworld. Ever since the orgy of the hors d'oeuvres things had beenevolving to grotesqueness, faces, whites of eyes, twisted red of lips, crow-like forms of waiters, colours of hats and uniforms, all involvedand jumbled in the mélee of talk and clink and clatter. 

The red hand of the waiter pouring the Chartreuse, green like a stormysunset, into small glasses before them broke into the vivid imaginingsthat had been unfolding in their talk through dinner. No, they had beensaying, it could not go on; some day amid the rending crash of shellsand the whine of shrapnel fragments, people everywhere, in all uniforms, in trenches, packed in camions, in stretchers, in hospitals, crowdedbehind guns, involved in telephone apparatus, generals at theirdinner-tables, colonels sipping liqueurs, majors developing photographs, would jump to their feet and burst out laughing at the solemn inanity, at the stupid, vicious pomposity of what they were doing. Laughter woulduntune the sky. It would be a new progress of Bacchus. Drunk withlaughter at the sudden vision of the silliness of the world, officersand soldiers, prisoners working on the roads, deserters being driventowards the trenches would throw down their guns and their spades andtheir heavy packs, and start marching, or driving in artillery waggonsor in camions, staff cars, private trains, towards their capitals, wherethey would laugh the deputies, the senators, the congressmen, the M. P. 'sout of their chairs, laugh the presidents and the prime ministers, andkaisers and dictators out of their plush-carpeted offices; the sun wouldwear a broad grin and would whisper the joke to the moon, who wouldgiggle and ripple with it all night long. . . . The red hand of the waiter, with thick nails and work-swollen knuckles, poured Chartreuse into thesmall glasses before them. 

"That, " said Tom Randolph, when he had half finished his liqueur, "isthe girl for me. "

"But, Tom, she's with a French officer. "

"They're fighting like cats and dogs. You can see that, can't you?"

"Yes, " agreed Howe vaguely. 

"Pay the bill. I'll meet you at the corner of the boulevard. " TomRandolph was out of the door. The girl, who had a little of the aspectof a pierrot, with dark skin and bright lips and gold-yellow hat anddress, and the sour-looking officer who was with her, were getting up togo. 

At the corner of the Boulevard Howe heard a woman's voice joining withRandolph's rich laugh. 

"What did I tell you? They split at the door and here we are, Howe. . . . Mademoiselle Montreil, let me introduce a friend. Look, before it's toolate, we must have a drink. "

At the café table next them an Englishman was seated with his head sunkon his chest. 

"Oh, I say, you woke me up. "

"Sorry. "

"No harm. Jolly good thing. "

They invited him over to their table. There was a moist look about hiseyes and a thickness to his voice that denoted alcohol. 

"You mustn't mind me. I'm forgetting. . . . I've been doing it for a week. This is the first leave I've had in eighteen months. You Canadians?"

"No. Ambulance service; Americans. "

"New at the game then. You're lucky. . . . Before I left the front I saw aman tuck a hand-grenade under the pillow of a poor devil of a Germanprisoner. The prisoner said, 'Thank you. ' The grenade blew him to hell!God! Know anywhere you can get whisky in this bloody town?"

"We'll have to hurry; it's near closing-time. "

"Right-o. "

They started off, Randolph and the girl talking intimately, their headsclose together, Martin supporting the Englishman. 

"I need a bit o' whisky to put me on my pins. "

They tumbled into the seats round a table at an American bar. 

The Englishman felt in his pocket. 

"Oh, I say, " he cried, "I've got a ticket to the theatre. It's a box. . . . We can all get in. Come along; let's hurry. "

They walked a long while, blundering through the dark streets, and atlast stopped at a blue-lighted door. 

"Here it is; push in. "

"But there are two gentlemen and a lady already in the box, meester. "

"No matter, there'll be room. " The Englishman waved the ticket in theair. 

The little round man with a round red face who was taking the ticketsstuttered in bad English and then dropped into French. Meanwhile, thewhole party had filed in, leaving the Englishman, who kept waving theticket in the little man's face. 

Two gendarmes, the theatre guards, came up menacingly; the Englishman'sface wreathed itself in smiles; he linked an arm in each of thegendarmes', and pushed them towards the bar. 

"Come drink to the Entente Cordiale. . . . Vive la France!"

In the box were two Australians and a woman who leaned her head on thechest of one and then the other alternately, laughing so that you couldsee the gold caps in her black teeth. 

They were annoyed at the intrusion that packed the box insupportablytight, so that the woman had to sit on the men's laps, but the air sooncleared in laughter that caused people in the orchestra to stare angrilyat the box full of noisy men in khaki. At last the Englishman came, squeezing himself in with a finger mysteriously on his lips. He pluckedat Martin's arm, a serious set look coming suddenly over his grey eyes. "It was like this"--his breath laden with whisky was like a halo roundMartin's head--"the Hun was a nice little chap, couldn't 'a' been morethan eighteen; had a shoulder broken and he thought that my pal wasfixing the pillow. He said 'Thank you' with a funny German accent. . . . Mind you, he said 'Thank you'; that's what hurt. And the man laughed. God damn him, he laughed when the poor devil said 'Thank you. ' And thegrenade blew him to hell. "

The stage was a glare of light in Martin's eyes; he felt as he had whenat home he had leaned over and looked straight into the headlight of anauto drawn up to the side of the road. Screening him from the glare werethe backs of people's heads: Tom Randolph's head and his girl's, side byside, their cheeks touching, the pointed red chin of one of theAustralians and the frizzy hair of the other woman. 

In the entr'acte they all stood at the bar, where it was very hot and anorchestra was playing and there were many men in khaki in all stages ofdrunkenness, being led about by women who threw jokes at each otherbehind the men's backs. 

"Here's to mud, " said one of the Australians. "The war'll end wheneverybody is drowned in mud. "

The orchestra began playing the _Madelon_ and everyone roared out themarching song that, worn threadbare as it was, still had a roisteringverve to it that caught people's blood. 

People had gone back for the last act. The two Australians, theEnglishman, and the two Americans still stood talking. 

"Mind you, I'm not what you'd call susceptible. I'm not soft. I got overall that long ago. " The Englishman was addressing the company ingeneral. "But the poor beggar said 'Thank you. '"

"What's he saying?" asked a woman, plucking at Martin's arm. 

"He's telling about a German atrocity. "

"Oh, the dirty Germans! What things they've done!" the woman answeredmechanically. 

Somehow, during the entr'acte, the Australians had collected anotherwoman; and a strange fat woman with lips painted very small, and verylarge bulging eyes, had attached herself to Martin. He suffered herbecause every time he looked at her she burst out laughing. 

The bar was closing. They had a drink of champagne all round that madethe fat woman give little shrieks of delight. They drifted towards thedoor, and stood, a formless, irresolute group, in the dark street infront of the theatre. 

Randolph came up to Martin. 

"Look. We're goin'. I wonder if I ought to leave my money with you . . . "

"I doubt if I'm a safe person to-night . . . "

"All right. I'll take it along. Look . . . Let's meet for breakfast. "

"At the _Café de la Paix_. "

"All right. If she is nice I'll bring her. "

"She looks charming. "

Tom Randolph pressed Martin's hand and was off. There was a sound of akiss in the darkness. 

"I say, I've got to have something to eat, " said the Englishman. "Ididn't have a bit of dinner. I say--mangai, mangai. " He made gestures ofputting things into his mouth in the direction of the fat woman. 

The three women put their heads together. One of them knew a place, butit was a dreadful place. Really, they mustn't think that . . . She onlyknew it because when she was very young a man had taken her there whowanted to seduce her. 

At that everyone laughed and the voices of the women rose shrill. 

"All right, don't talk; let's go there, " said one of the Australians. "We'll attend to the seducing. "

A thick woman, a tall comb in the back of her high-piled black hair, andan immovable face with jaw muscled like a prize-fighter's, served themwith cold chicken and ham and champagne in a room with moulderinggreenish wall-paper lighted by a red-shaded lamp. 

The Australians ate and sang and made love to their women. TheEnglishman went to sleep with his head on the table. 

Martin leaned back out of the circle of light, keeping up a desultoryconversation with the woman beside him, listening to the sounds of themen's voices down corridors, of the front door being opened and slammedagain and again, and of forced, shrill giggles of women. 

"Unfortunately, I have an engagement to-night, " said Martin to the womanbeside him, whose large spherical breasts heaved as she talked, and whorolled herself nearer to him invitingly, seeming with her round pop-eyesand her round cheeks to be made up entirely of small spheres and largesoft ones. 

"Oh, but it is too late. You can break it. "

"It's at four o'clock. "

"Then we have time, ducky. "

"It's something really romantic, you see. "

"The young are always lucky. " She rolled her eyes in sympatheticadmiration. "This will be the fourth night this week that I have notmade a sou. . . . I'll chuck myself into the river soon. "

Martin felt himself softening towards her. He slipped a twenty-francnote in her hand. 

"Oh, you are too good. You are really galant homme, you. "

Martin buried his face in his hands, dreaming of the woman he would liketo love to-night. She should be very dark, with red lips and stainedcheeks, like Randolph's girl; she should have small breasts and slender, dark, dancer's thighs, and in her arms he could forget everything butthe madness and the mystery and the intricate life of Paris about them. He thought of Montmartre, and Louise in the opera standing at her windowsinging the madness of Paris. . . . 

One of the Australians had gone away with a little woman in a pinknegligée. The other Australian and the Englishman were standingunsteadily near the table, each supported by a sleepy-looking girl. Leaving the fat woman sadly finishing the remains of the chicken, largetears rolling from her eyes, they left the house and walked for a longtime down dark streets, three men and two women, the Englishman beingsupported in the middle, singing in a desultory fashion. 

They stopped under a broken sign of black letters on greyish glass, within which one feeble electric light bulb made a red glow. Thepavement was wet, and glimmered where it slanted up to the lamp-post atthe next corner. 

"Here we are. Come along, Janey, " cried the Australian in a brisk voice. 

The door opened and slammed again. Martin and the other girl stood onthe pavement facing each other. The Englishman collapsed on thedoorstep, and began to snore. 

"Well, there's only you and me, " she said. 

"Oh, if you were only a person, instead of being a member of aprofession----" said Martin softly. 

"Come, " she said. 

"No, dearie. I must go, " said Martin. 

"As you will. I'll take care of your friend. " She yawned. 

He kissed her and strode down the dark street, his nostrils full of thesmell of the rouge on her lips. 

He walked a long while with his hat off, breathing deep of the sharpnight air. The streets were black and silent. Intemperate desiresprowled like cats in the darkness. 

 * * * * *

He woke up and stretched himself stiffly, smelling grass and damp earth. A pearly lavender mist was all about him, through which loomed thesquare towers of Notre Dame and the row of kings across the façade andthe sculpture about the darkness of the doorways. He had lain down onhis back on the little grass plot of the Parvis Notre Dame to look atthe stars, and had fallen asleep. 

It must be nearly dawn. Words were droning importunately in his head. "The poor beggar said 'Thank you' with a funny German accent and thegrenade blew him to hell. " He remembered the man he had once helped topick up in whose pocket a grenade had exploded. Before that he had notrealised that torn flesh was such a black-red, like sausage meat. 

"Get up, you can't lie there, " cried a gendarme. 

"Notre Dame is beautiful in the morning, " said Martin, stepping acrossthe low rail on to the pavement. 

"Ah, yes; it is beautiful. "

Martin Howe sat on the rail of the bridge and looked. Before him, withnothing distinct yet to be seen, were two square towers and the tracerybetween them and the row of kings on the façade, and the long series offlying buttresses of the flank, gleaming through the mist, and, barelyvisible, the dark, slender spire soaring above the crossing. So had theabbey in the forest gleamed tall in the misty moonlight; like mist, onlydrab and dense, the dust had risen above the tall apse as the shellstore it to pieces. 

 * * * * *

Amid a smell of new-roasted coffee he sat at a table and watched peoplepass briskly through the ruddy sunlight. Waiters in shirt-sleeves wererubbing off the other tables and putting out the chairs. He sat sippingcoffee, feeling languid and nerveless. After a while Tom Randolph, looking very young and brown with his hat a little on one side, camealong. With him, plainly dressed in blue serge, was the girl. They satdown and she dropped her head on his shoulder, covering her eyes withher dark lashes. 

"Oh, I am so tired. "

"Poor child! You must go home and go back to bed. "

"But I've got to go to work. "

"Poor thing. " They kissed each other tenderly and languidly. 

The waiter came with coffee and hot milk and little crisp loaves ofbread. 

"Oh, Paris is wonderful in the early morning!" said Martin. 

"Indeed it is. . . . Good-bye, little girl, if you must go. We'll see eachother again. "

"You must call me Yvonne. " She pouted a little. 

"All right, Yvonne. " He got to his feet and pressed her two hands. 

"Well, what sort of a time did you have, Howe?"

"Curious. I lost our friends one by one, left two women and slept alittle while on the grass in front of Notre Dame. That was my real loveof the night. "

"My girl was charming. . . . Honestly, I'd marry her in a minute. " Helaughed a merry laugh. 

"Let's take a cab somewhere. "

They climbed into a victoria and told the driver to go to the Madeleine. 

"Look, before I do anything else I must go to the hotel. "

"Why?"

"Preventives. "

"Of course; you'd better go at once. "

The cab rattled merrily along the streets where the early sunshine castrusty patches on the grey houses and on the thronged fantasticchimney-pots that rose in clusters and hedges from the mansard roofs. 

CHAPTER VI

The lamp in the hut of the road control casts an oblong of light on thewhite wall opposite. The patch of light is constantly crossed andscalloped and obscured by shadows of rifles and helmets and packs of menpassing. Now and then the shadow of a single man, a nose and a chinunder a helmet, a head bent forward with the weight of the pack, or apack alone beside which slants a rifle, shows up huge and fantastic withits loaf of bread and its pair of shoes and its pots and pans. 

Then with a jingle of harness and clank of steel, train after train ofartillery comes up out of the darkness of the road, is thrown by thelamp into vivid relief and is swallowed again by the blackness of thevillage street, short bodies of seventy-fives sticking like ducks' tailsfrom between their large wheels; caisson after caisson of ammunition, huge waggons hooded and unhooded, filled with a chaos of equipment thatcatches fantastic lights and throws huge muddled shadows on the whitewall of the house. 

"Put that light out. Name of God, do you want to have them startchucking shells into here?" comes a voice shrill with anger. The brisktrot of the officer's horse is lost in the clangour. 

The door of the hut slams to and only a thin ray of orange lightpenetrates into the blackness of the road, where with jingle of harnessand clatter of iron and tramp of hoofs, gun after gun, caisson aftercaisson, waggon after waggon files by. Now and then the passing stopsentirely and matches flare where men light pipes and cigarettes. Comingfrom the other direction with throbbing of motors, a convoy of camions, huge black oblongs, grinds down the other side of the road. Horses rearand there are shouts and curses and clacking of reins in the darkness. 

Far away where the lowering clouds meet the hills beyond the village awhite glare grows and fades again at intervals: star-shells. 

 * * * * *

"There's a most tremendous concentration of sanitary sections. "

"You bet; two American sections and a French one in this village; threemore down the road. Something's up. "

"There's goin' to be an attack at St. Mihiel, a Frenchman told me. "

"I heard that the Germans were concentrating for an offensive in theFour de Paris. "

"Damned unlikely. "

"Anyway, this is the third week we've been in this bloody hole with ourfeet in the mud. "

"They've got us quartered in a barn with a regular brook flowing throughthe middle of it. "

"The main thing about this damned war is ennui--just plain boredom. "

"Not forgetting the mud. "

Three ambulance drivers in slickers were on the front seat of a car. Therain fell in perpendicular sheets, pattering on the roof of the car andon the puddles that filled the village street. Streaming with water, blackened walls of ruined houses rose opposite them above a rank growthof weeds. Beyond were rain-veiled hills. Every little while, slitheringthrough the rain, splashing mud to the right and left, a convoy ofcamions went by and disappeared, truck after truck, in the whitestreaming rain. 

Inside the car Tom Randolph was playing an accordion, letting strangenostalgic little songs filter out amid the hard patter of the rain. 

 "_Oh, I's been workin' on de railroad All de livelong day; I's been workin' on de railroad Jus' to pass de time away. _"

The men on the front seat leaned back and shook the water off theirknees and hummed the song. 

The accordion had stopped. Tom Randolph was lying on his back on thefloor of the car with his arm over his eyes. The rain fell endlessly, rattling on the roof of the car, dancing silver in the coffee-colouredpuddles of the road. Their boredom fell into the rhythm of crooningself-pity of the old coon song:

 "_I's been workin' on de railroad All de livelong day; I's been workin' on de railroad Jus' to pass de time away. _"

"Oh, God, something's got to happen soon. "

Lost in rubber boots, and a huge gleaming slicker and hood, the sectionleader splashed across the road. 

"All cars must be ready to leave at six to-night. "

"Yay. Where we goin'?"

"Orders haven't come yet. We're to be in readiness to leave at sixto-night. . . . "

"I tell you, fellers, there's goin' to be an attack. This concentrationof sanitary sections means something. You can't tell me . . . "

 * * * * *

"They say they have beer, " said the aspirant behind Martin in the longline of men who waited in the hot sun for the copé to open, while thedust the staff cars and camions raised as they whirred by on the roadsettled in a blanket over the village. 

"Cold beer?"

"Of course not, " said the aspirant, laughing so that all the brilliantivory teeth showed behind his red lips. "It'll be detestable. I'mgetting it because it's rare, for sentimental reasons. "

Martin laughed, looking in the man's brown face, a face in which allpast expressions seemed to linger in the fine lines about the mouth andeyes and in the modelling of the cheeks and temples. 

"You don't understand that, " said the aspirant again. 

"Indeed I do. "

Later they sat on the edge of the stone wellhead in the courtyard behindthe store, drinking warm beer out of tin cups blackened by wine, andstaring at a tall barn that had crumpled at one end so that it looked, with its two frightened little square windows, like a cow kneeling down. 

"Is it true that the ninety-second's going up to the lines to-night?"

"Yes, we're going up to make a little attack. Probably I'll come back inyour little omnibus. "

"I hope you won't. "

"I'd be very glad to. A lucky wound! But I'll probably be killed. Thisis the first time I've gone up to the front that I didn't expect to bekilled. So it'll probably happen. "

Martin Howe could not help looking at him suddenly. The aspirant sat atease on the stone margin of the well, leaning against the wrought ironsupport for the bucket, one knee clasped in his strong, heavily-veinedhands. Dead he would be different. Martin's mind could hardly grasp theconnection between this man full of latent energies, full of thoughtsand desires, this man whose shoulder he would have liked to have put hisarm round from friendliness, with whom he would have liked to go forlong walks, with whom he would have liked to sit long into the nightdrinking and talking--and those huddled, pulpy masses of blue uniformhalf-buried in the mud of ditches. 

"Have you ever seen a herd of cattle being driven to abattoir on a fineMay morning?" asked the aspirant in a scornful, jaunty tone, as if hehad guessed Martin's thoughts. 

"I wonder what they think of it. "

"It's not that I'm resigned. . . . Don't think that. Resignation is tooeasy. That's why the herd can be driven by a boy of six . . . Or a primeminister!"

Martin was sitting with his arms crossed. The fingers of one hand weresqueezing the muscle of his forearm. It gave him pleasure to feel thesmooth, firm modelling of his arm through his sleeve. And how would thatfeel when it was dead, when a steel splinter had slithered through it? Amomentary stench of putrefaction filled his nostrils, making his stomachcontract with nausea. 

"I'm not resigned either, " he shouted in a laugh. "I am going to dosomething some day, but first I must see. I want to be initiated in allthe circles of hell. "

"I'd play the part of Virgil pretty well, " said the aspirant, "but Isuppose Virgil was a staff officer. "

"I must go, " said Martin. "My name's Martin Howe, S. S. U. 84. "

"Oh yes, you are quartered in the square. My name is Merrier. You'llprobably carry me back in your little omnibus. "

 * * * * *

When Howe got back to where the cars were packed in a row in the villagesquare, Randolph came up to him and whispered in his ear:

"D. J. 's to-morrow. "

"What's that?"

"The attack. It's to-morrow at three in the morning; instructions aregoing to be given out to-night. "

A detonation behind them was like a blow on the head, making theirear-drums ring. The glass in the headlight of one of the cars tinkled tothe ground. 

"The 410 behind the church, that was. Pretty near knocks the wind out ofyou. "

"Say, Randolph, have you heard the new orders?"

"No. "

A tall, fair-haired man came out from the front of his car where he hadbeen working on the motor, holding his grease-covered hands away fromhim. 

"It's put off, " he said, lowering his voice mysteriously. "D. J. 's nottill day after to-morrow at four-twenty. But to-morrow we're going up torelieve the section that's coming out and take over the posts. They sayit's hell up there. The Germans have a new gas that you can't smell atall. The other section's got about five men gassed, and a bunch of themhave broken down. The posts are shelled all the time. "

"Great, " said Tom Randolph. "We'll see the real thing this time. "

There was a whistling shriek overhead and all three of them fell in aheap on the ground in front of the car. There was a crash that echoedamid the house-walls, and a pillar of black smoke stood like a cypresstree at the other end of the village street. 

"Talk about the real thing!" said Martin. 

"Ole 410 evidently woke 'em up some. "

 * * * * *

It was the fifth time that day that Martin's car had passed thecross-roads where the calvary was. Someone had propped up the fallencrucifix so that it tilted dark despairing arms against the sunset skywhere the sun gleamed like a huge copper kettle lost in its own steam. The rain made bright yellowish stripes across the sky and dripped fromthe cracked feet of the old wooden Christ, whose gaunt, scarred figurehung out from the tilted cross, swaying a little under the beating ofthe rain. Martin was wiping the mud from his hands after changing awheel. He stared curiously at the fallen jowl and the cavernous eyesthat had meant for some country sculptor ages ago the utterest agony ofpain. Suddenly he noticed that where the crown of thorns had been aboutthe forehead of the Christ someone had wound barbed wire. He smiled, andasked the swaying figure in his mind:

"And You, what do You think of it?"

For an instant he could feel wire barbs ripping through his own flesh. 

He leaned over to crank the car. 

The road was filled suddenly with the tramp and splash of troopsmarching, their wet helmets and their rifles gleaming in the copperysunset. Even through the clean rain came the smell of filth and sweatand misery of troops marching. The faces under the helmets were strainedand colourless and cadaverous from the weight of the equipment on theirnecks and their backs and their thighs. The faces drooped under thehelmets, tilted to one side or the other, distorted and wooden like theface of the figure that dangled from the cross. 

Above the splash of feet through mud and the jingle of equipment, cameoccasionally the ping, ping of shrapnel bursting at the next cross-roadsat the edge of the woods. 

Martin sat in the car with the motor racing, waiting for the end of thecolumn. 

One of the stragglers who floundered along through the churned mud ofthe road after the regular ranks had passed stopped still and looked upat the tilted cross. From the next cross-roads came, at intervals, thesharp twanging ping of shrapnel bursting. 

The straggler suddenly began kicking feebly at the prop of the crosswith his foot, and then dragged himself off after the column. The crossfell forward with a dull splintering splash into the mud of the road. 

 * * * * *

The road went down the hill in long zig-zags, through a village at thebottom where out of the mist that steamed from the little river a spirewith a bent weathercock rose above the broken roof of the church, thenup the hill again into the woods. In the woods the road stretched greenand gold in the first horizontal sunlight. Among the thick trees, roofscovered with branches, were rows of long portable barracks with doorsdecorated with rustic work. At one place a sign announced in lettersmade of wattled sticks, _Camp des Pommiers_. 

A few birds sang in the woods, and at a pump they passed a lot of menstripped to the waist who were leaning over washing, laughing andsplashing in the sunlight. Every now and then, distant, metallic, thepong, pong, pong of a battery of seventy-fives resounded through therustling trees. 

"Looks like a camp meetin' ground in Georgia, " said Tom Randolph, blowing his whistle to make two men carrying a large steaming pot on apole between them get out of the way. 

The road became muddier as they went deeper into the woods, and, turninginto a cross-road, the car began slithering, skidding a little at theturns, through thick soupy mud. On either side the woods became brokenand jagged, stumps and split boughs littering the ground, trees snappedoff halfway up. In the air there was a scent of newly-split timber andof turned-up woodland earth, and among them a sweetish rough smell. 

Covered with greenish mud, splashing the mud right and left with theirgreat flat wheels, camions began passing them returning from thedirection of the lines. 

At last at a small red cross flag they stopped and ran the car into agrove of tall chestnuts, where they parked it beside another car oftheir section and lay down among the crisp leaves, listening tooccasional shells whining far overhead. All through the wood was acontinuous ping, pong, ping of batteries, with the crash of a big guncoming now and then like the growl of a bull-frog among the sing-song ofsmall toads in a pond at night. 

Through the trees from where they lay they could see the close-packedwooden crosses of a cemetery from which came a sound of spaded earth, and where, preceded by a priest in a muddy cassock, little two-wheeledcarts piled with shapeless things in sacks kept being brought up andunloaded and dragged away again. 

 * * * * *

Showing alternately dark and light in the sun and shadow of the woodlandroad, a cook waggon, short chimney giving out blue smoke, and cauldronssteaming, clatters ahead of Martin and Randolph; the backs of two men inheavy blue coats, their helmets showing above the narrow driver's seat. On either side of the road short yellow flames keep spitting up, slanting from hidden guns amid a pandemonium of noise. 

Up the road a sudden column of black smoke rises among falling trees. Alouder explosion and the cook waggon in front of them vanishes in a newwhirl of thick smoke. Accelerator pressed down, the car plunges alongthe rutted road, tips, and a wheel sinks in the new shell-hole. The hindwheels spin for a moment, spattering gravel about, and just as anotherroar comes behind them, bite into the road again and the car goes on, speeding through the alternate sun and shadow of the woods. Martinremembers the beating legs of a mule rolling on its back on the side ofthe road and, steaming in the fresh morning air, the purple and yellowand red of its ripped belly. 

"Did you get the smell of almonds? I sort of like it, " says Randolph, drawing a long breath as the car slowed down again. 

 * * * * *

The woods at night, fantastic blackness full of noise and yellow leapingflames from the mouths of guns. Now and then the sulphurous flash of ashell explosion and the sound of trees falling and shell fragmentsswishing through the air. At intervals over a little knoll in thedirection of the trenches, a white star-shell falls slowly, making thetrees and the guns among their tangle of hiding branches cast longgreen-black shadows, drowning the wood in a strange glare of desolation. 

"Where the devil's the abri?"

Everything drowned in the detonations of three guns, one after theother, so near as to puff hot air in their faces in the midst of theblinding concussion. 

"Look, Tom, this is foolish; the abri's right here. "

"I haven't got it in my pocket, Howe. Damn those guns. "

Again everything is crushed in the concussion of the guns. 

They throw themselves on the ground as a shell shrieks and explodes. There is a moment's pause, and gravel and bits of bark tumble abouttheir heads. 

"We've got to find that abri. I wish I hadn't lost my flashlight. "

"Here it is! No, that stinks too much. Must be the latrine. "

"Say, Tom. "

"Here. "

"Damn, I ran into a tree. I found it. "

"All right. Coming. "

Martin held out his hand until Randolph bumped into it; then theystumbled together down the rough wooden steps, pulled aside the blanketthat served to keep the light in, and found themselves blinking in thelow tunnel of the abri. 

Brancardiers were asleep in the two tiers of bunks that filled up thesides, and at the table at the end a lieutenant of the medical corps waswriting by the light of a smoky lamp. 

"They are landing some round here to-night, " he said, pointing out twounoccupied bunks. "I'll call you when we need a car. "

As he spoke, in succession the three big guns went off. The concussionput the lamp out. 

"Damn, " said Tom Randolph. 

The lieutenant swore and struck a match. 

"The red light of the poste de secours is out, too, " said Martin. 

"No use lighting it again with those unholy mortars. . . . It's idiotic toput a poste de secours in the middle of a battery like this. "

The Americans lay down to try to sleep. Shell after shell exploded roundthe dugout, but regularly every few minutes came the hammer blows of themortars, half the time putting the light out. 

A shell explosion seemed to split the dugout and a piece of éclatwhizzed through the blanket that curtained off the door. Someone triedto pick it up as it lay half-buried in the board floor, and pulled hisfingers away quickly, blowing on them. The men turned over in the bunksand laughed, and a smile came over the drawn green face of a wounded manwho sat very quiet behind the lieutenant, staring at the smoky flame ofthe lamp. 

The curtain was pulled aside and a man staggered in holding with theother hand a limp arm twisted in a mud-covered sleeve, from which bloodand mud dripped on to the floor. 

"Hello, old chap, " said the doctor quietly. A smell of disinfectantstole through the dugout. 

Faint above the incessant throbbing of explosions, the sound of a claxonhorn. 

"Ha, gas, " said the doctor. "Put on your masks, children. " A man wentalong the dugout waking those who were asleep and giving out freshmasks. Someone stood in the doorway blowing a shrill whistle, then therewas again the clamour of a claxon near at hand. 

The band of the gas mask was tight about Martin's forehead, biting intothe skin. 

He and Randolph sat side by side on the edge of the bunk, looking outthrough the crinkled isinglass eyepieces at the men in the dugout, mostof whom had gone to sleep again. 

"God, I envy a man who can snore through a gas-mask, " said Randolph. 

Men's heads had a ghoulish look, strange large eyes and grey oilclothflaps instead of faces. 

Outside the constant explosions had given place to a series of swishingwhistles, merging together into a sound as of water falling, only lessregular, more sibilant. Occasionally there was the rending burst of ashell, and at intervals came the swinging detonations of the three guns. In the dugout, except for two men who snored loudly, raspingly, everyonewas quiet. 

Several stretchers with wounded men on them were brought in and laid inthe end of the dugout. 

Gradually, as the bombardment continued, men began sliding into thedugout, crowding together, touching each other for company, speaking inlow voices through their masks. 

"A mask, in the name of God, a mask!" a voice shouted, breaking into asqueal, and an unshaven man, with mud caked in his hair and beard, burstthrough the curtain. His eyelids kept up a continual trembling and thewater streamed down both sides of his nose. 

"O God, " he kept talking in a rasping whisper, "O God, they're allkilled. There were six mules on my waggon and a shell killed them alland threw me into the ditch. You can't find the road any more. They'reall killed. "

An orderly was wiping his face as if it were a child's. 

"They're all killed and I lost my mask. . . . O God, this gas . . . "

The doctor, a short man, looking like a gnome in his mask with itswheezing rubber nosepiece, was walking up and down with short, slowsteps. 

Suddenly, as three soldiers came in, drawing the curtain aside, heshouted in a shrill, high-pitched voice:

"Keep the curtain closed! Do you want to asphyxiate us?"

He strode up to the newcomers, his voice strident like an angry woman's. "What are you doing here? This is the poste de secours. Are youwounded?"

"But, my lieutenant, we can't stay outside . . . "

"Where's your own cantonment? You can't stay here; you can't stay here, "he shrieked. 

"But, my lieutenant, our dugout's been hit. "

"You can't stay here. You can't stay here. There's not enough room forthe wounded. Name of God!"

"But, my lieutenant . . . "

"Get the hell out of here, d'you hear?"

The men began stumbling out into the darkness, tightening theadjustments of their masks behind their heads. 

The guns had stopped firing. There was nothing but the constant swishingand whistling of gas-shells, like endless pails of dirty water beingthrown on gravel. 

"We've been at it three hours, " whispered Martin to Tom Randolph. 

"God, suppose these masks need changing. "

The sweat from Martin's face steamed in the eyepieces, blinding him. 

"Any more masks?" he asked. 

A brancardier handed him one. "There aren't any more in the abri. "

"I have some more in the car, " said Martin. 

"I'll get one, " cried Randolph, getting to his feet. 

They started out of the door together. In the light that streamed out asthey drew the flap aside they saw a tree opposite them. A shellexploded, it seemed, right on top of them; the tree rose and bowedtowards them and fell. 

"Are you all there, Tom?" whispered Martin, his ears ringing. 

"Bet your life. "

Someone pulled them back into the abri. "Here; we've found another. "

Martin lay down on the bunk again, drawing with difficulty each breath. His lips had a wet, decomposed feeling. 

At the wrist of the arm he rested his head on, the watch tickedcomfortably. 

He began to think how ridiculous it would be if he, Martin Howe, shouldbe extinguished like this. The gas-mask might be defective. 

God, it would be silly. 

Outside the gas-shells were still coming in. The lamp showed through afaint bluish haze. Everyone was still waiting. 

Another hour. 

Martin began to recite to himself the only thing he could remember, overand over again in time to the ticking of his watch. 

 "_Ah, sunflower, weary of time. Ah, sunflower, weary of time, Who countest the steps of the sun; Ah, sunflower, weary of time, Who countest . . . _"

"One, two, three, four, " he counted the shells outside exploding atirregular intervals. 

There were periods of absolute silence, when he could hear batteriespong, pong, pong in the distance. 

He began again. 

 "_Ah, sunflower, weary of time, Who countest the steps of the sun In search of that far golden clime Where the traveller's journey is done. _

 "_Where the youth pined away with desire And the pale virgin shrouded in snow Arise from their graves and aspire Where my sunflower wishes to go. _"

Whang, whang, whang; the battery alongside began again, sending out thelight. Someone pulled the blanket aside. A little leprous greynessfiltered into the dugout. 

"Ah, it's getting light. "

The doctor went out and they could hear his steps climbing up to thelevel of the ground. 

Howe saw a man take his mask off and spit. 

"Oh, God, a cigarette!" Tom Randolph cried, pulling his mask off. Theair of the woods was fresh and cool outside. Everything was lost in mistthat filled the shell-holes as with water and wreathed itselffantastically about the shattered trunks of trees. Here and there wasstill a little greenish haze of gas. It cut their throats and made theireyes run as they breathed in the cool air of the dawn. 

 * * * * *

Dawn in a wilderness of jagged stumps and ploughed earth; against theyellow sky, the yellow glare of guns that squat like toads in a tangleof wire and piles of brass shell-cases and split wooden boxes. Longrutted roads littered with shell-cases stretching through the wreckedwoods in the yellow light; strung alongside of them, tangled masses oftelephone wires. Torn camouflage fluttering greenish-grey against theardent yellow sky, and twining among the fantastic black leafless trees, the greenish wraiths of gas. Along the roads camions overturned, deadmules tangled in their traces beside shattered caissons, huddled bodiesin long blue coats half buried in the mud of the ditches. 

"We've got to pass. . . . We've got five very bad cases. "

"Impossible. "

"We've got to pass. . . . Sacred name of God!"

"But it is impossible. Two camions are blocked across the road and thereare three batteries of seventy-fives waiting to get up the road. "

Long lines of men on horseback with gas-masks on, a rearing offrightened horses and jingle of harness. 

"Talk to 'em, Howe, for God's sake; we've got to get past. "

"I'm doing the best I can, Tom. "

"Well, make 'em look lively. Damn this gas!"

"Put your masks on again; you can't breathe without them in thishollow. "

"Hay! ye God-damn sons of bitches, get out of the way. "

"But they can't. "

"Oh, hell, I'll go talk to 'em. You take the wheel. "

"No, sit still and don't get excited. "

"You're the one's getting excited. "

"Damn this gas. "

"My lieutenant, I beg you to move the horses to the side of the road. Ihave five very badly wounded men. They will die in this gas. I've got toget by. "

"God damn him, tell him to hurry. "

"Shut up, Tom, for God's sake. "

"They're moving. I can't see a thing in this mask. "

"Hah, that did for the two back horses. "

"Halt! Is there any room in the ambulance? One of my men's just got histhigh ripped up. "

"No room, no room. "

"He'll have to go to a poste de secours. "

The fresh air blowing hard in their faces and the woods getting greeneron either side, full of ferns and small plants that half cover thestrands of barbed wire and the rows of shells. 

At the end of the woods the sun rises golden into a cloudless sky, andon the grassy slope of the valley sheep and a herd of little donkeys arefeeding, looking up with quietly moving jaws as the ambulance, smellingof blood and filthy sweat-soaked clothes, rattles by. 

 * * * * *

Black night. All through the woods along the road squatting mortars spityellow flame. Constant throbbing of detonations. 

Martin, inside the ambulance, is holding together a broken stretcher, while the car jolts slowly along. It is pitch dark in the car, exceptwhen the glare of a gun from near the road gives him a momentary view ofthe man's head, a mass of bandages from the middle of which a little bitof blood-soaked beard sticks out, and of his lean body tossing on thestretcher with every jolt of the car. Martin is kneeling on the floor ofthe car, his knees bruised by the jolting, holding the man on thestretcher, with his chest pressed on the man's chest and one armstretched down to keep the limp bandaged leg still. 

The man's breath comes with a bubbling sound, now and then mingling withan articulate groan. 

"Softly. . . . Oh, softly, oh--oh--oh!"

"Slow as you can, Tom, old man, " Martin calls out above the pandemoniumof firing on both sides of the road, tightening the muscles of his armin a desperate effort to keep the limp leg from bouncing. The smell ofblood and filth is misery in his nostrils. 

"Softly. . . . Softly. . . . Oh--oh--oh!" The groan is barely heard amid thebubbling breath. 

Pitch dark in the car. Martin, his every muscle taut with the agony ofthe man's pain, is on his knees, pressing his chest on the man's chest, trying with an arm stretched along the man's leg to keep him frombouncing in the broken stretcher. 

"Needn't have troubled to have brought him, " said the hospital orderly, as blood dripped fast from the stretcher, black in the light of thelantern. "He's pretty near dead now. He won't last long. "

CHAPTER VII

"So you like it, Will? You like this sort of thing?"

Martin Howe was stretched on the grass of a hillside a little above across-roads. Beside him squatted a ruddy-faced youth with a smudge ofgrease on his faintly-hooked nose. A champagne bottle rested against hisknees. 

"Yes. I've never been happier in my life. It's a coarse boozing sort ofa life, but I like it. "

They looked over the landscape of greyish rolling hills scarredeverywhere by new roads and ranks of wooden shacks. Along the roadbeneath them crawled like beetles convoy after convoy of motor-trucks. The wind came to them full of a stench of latrines and of the exhaust ofmotors. 

"The last time I saw you, " said Martin, after a pause, "was early onemorning on the Cambridge bridge. I was walking out from Boston, and wetalked of the Eroica they'd played at the Symphony, and you said it wassilly to have a great musician try to play soldier. D'you remember?"

"No. That was in another incarnation. Have some fizz. "

He poured from the bottle into a battered tin cup. 

"But talking about playing soldier, Howe, I must tell you about how ourlieutenant got the Croix de Guerre. . . . Somebody ought to write a bookcalled _Heroisms of the Great War_. . . . "

"I am sure that many people have, and will. You probably'll do ityourself, Will. But go on. "

The sun burst from the huddled clouds for a moment, mottling the hillsand the scarred valleys with light. The shadow of an aeroplane flyinglow passed across the field, and the snoring of its motors cut out allother sound. 

"Well, our louie's name's Duval, but he spells it with a small 'd' and abig 'V. ' He's been wanting a Croix de Guerre for a hell of a timebecause lots of fellows in the section have been getting 'em. He triedgiving dinners to the General Staff and everything, but that didn't seemto work. So there was nothing to it but to get wounded. So he took togoing to the front posts; but the trouble was that it was a hell of aquiet sector and no shells ever came within a mile of it. At lastsomebody made a mistake and a little Austrian eighty-eight came tumblingin and popped about fifty yards from his staff car. He showed the mostmarvellous presence of mind, 'cause he clapped his hand over his eye andsank back in the seat with a groan. The doctor asked what was thematter, but old Duval just kept his hand tight over his eye and said, 'Nothing, nothing; just a scratch, ' and went off to inspect the posts. Of course the posts didn't need inspecting. And he rode round all daywith a handkerchief over one eye and a look of heroism in the other. Butnever would he let the doctor even peep at it. Next morning he came outwith a bandage round his head as big as a sheik's turban. He went to seeheadquarters in that get-up and lunched with the staff-officers. Well, he got his Croix de Guerre all right--cited for assuring the evacuationof the wounded under fire and all the rest of it. "

"Some bird. He'll probably get to be a general before the war's over. "

Howe poured out the last of the champagne, and threw the bottlelistlessly off into the grass, where it struck an empty shell-case andbroke. 

"But, Will, you can't like this, " he said. "It's all so like anash-heap, a huge garbage-dump of men and equipment. "

"I suppose it is . . . " said the ruddy-faced youth, discovering the greaseon his nose and rubbing it off with the back of his hand. "Damn thosedirty Fords. They get grease all over you! I suppose it is that life wasso dull in America that anything seems better. I worked a year in anoffice before leaving home. Give me the garbage-dump. "

"Look, " said Martin, shading his eyes with his hand and staring straightup into the sky. "There are two planes fighting. "

They both screwed up their eyes to stare into the sky, where two bits ofmica were circling. Below them, like wads of cotton-wool, some white andothers black, were rows of the smoke-puffs of shrapnel fromanti-aircraft guns. 

The two boys watched the specks in silence. At last one began to growlarger, seemed to be falling in wide spirals. The other had vanished. The falling aeroplane started rising again into the middle sky, thenstopped suddenly, burst into flames, and fluttered down behind thehills, leaving an irregular trail of smoke. 

"More garbage, " said the ruddy-faced youth, as he rose to his feet. 

 * * * * *

"Shrapnel. What a funny place to shoot shrapnel!"

"They must have got the bead on that bunch of material the genie'sbringing in. "

There was an explosion and a vicious whine of shrapnel bullets among thetrees. On the road a staff-car turned round hastily and speeded back. 

Martin got up from where he was lying on the grass under a pine tree, looking at the sky, and put his helmet on; as he did so there wasanother sharp bang overhead and a little reddish-brown cloud thatsuddenly spread and drifted away among the quiet tree-tops. He took offhis helmet and examined it quizzically. 

"Tom, I've got a dent in the helmet. "

Tom Randolph made a grab for the little piece of jagged iron that hadrebounded from the helmet and lay at his feet. 

"God damn, it's hot, " he cried, dropping it; "anyway, finding'skeepings. " He put his foot on the shrapnel splinter. 

"That ought to be mine, I swear, Tom. "

"You've got the dent, Howe; what more do you want?"

"Damn hog. "

Martin sat on the top step of the dugout, diving down whenever he hearda shell-shriek loudening in the distance. Beside him was a tall man withthe crossed cannon of the artillery in his helmet, and a shrunken brownface with crimson-veined cheeks and very long silky black moustaches. 

"A dirty business, " he said. "It's idiotic. . . . Name of a dog!"

Grabbing each other's arms, they tumbled down the steps together as ashell passed overhead to burst in a tree down the road. 

"Now look at that. " The man held up his musette to Howe. "I've brokenthe bottle of Bordeaux I had in my musette. It's idiotic. "

"Been on permission?"

"Don't I look it?"

They sat at the top of the steps again; the man took out bits of wetglass dripping red wine from his little bag, swearing all the while. 

"I was bringing it to the little captain. He's a nice little old chap, the little captain, and he loves good wine. "

"Bordeaux?"

"Can't you smell it? It's Medoc, 1900, from my own vines. . . . Look, tasteit, there's still a little. " He held up the neck of the bottle andMartin took a sip. 

The artilleryman drank the rest of it, twisted his long moustaches andheaved a deep sigh. 

"Go there, my poor good old wine. " He threw the remnants of the bottleinto the underbrush. Shrapnel burst a little down the road. "Oh, this isa dirty business! I am a Gascon. . . . I like to live. " He put a dirtybrown hand on Martin's arm. 

"How old do you think I am?"

"Thirty-five. "

"I am twenty-four. Look at the picture. " From a tattered black note-bookheld together by an elastic band he pulled a snapshot of a jolly-lookingyoung man with a fleshy face and his hands tucked into the top of awide, tightly-wound sash. He looked at the picture, smiling and tuggingat one of his long moustaches. "Then I was twenty. It's the war. " Heshrugged his shoulders and put the picture carefully back into hisinside pocket. "Oh, it's idiotic!"

"You must have had a tough time. "

"It's just that people aren't meant for this sort of thing, " said theartilleryman quietly. "You don't get accustomed. The more you see theworse it is. Then you end by going crazy. Oh, it's idiotic!"

"How did you find things at home?"

"Oh, at home! Oh, what do I care about that now? They get on withoutyou. . . . But we used to know how to live, we Gascons. We worked so hardon the vines and on the fruit-trees, and we kept a horse and carriage. Ihad the best-looking rig in the department. Sunday it was fun; we'd playbowls and I'd ride about with my wife. Oh, she was nice in those days!She was young and fat and laughed all the time. She was something a mancould put his arms around, she was. We'd go out in my rig. It wasclick-clack of the whip in the air and off we were in the broad road. . . . Sacred name of a pig, that one was close. . . . And the Marquis ofMontmarieul had a rig, too, but not so good as mine, and my horse wouldalways pass his in the road. Oh, it was funny, and he'd look so sour tohave common people like us pass him in the road. . . . Boom, there'sanother. . . . And the Marquis now is nicely embusqué in the automobileservice. He is stationed at Versailles. . . . And look at me. . . . But whatdo I care about all that now?"

"But after the war . . . "

"After the war?" He spat savagely on the first step of the dugout. "Theylearn to get on without you. "

"But we'll be free to do as we please. "

"We'll never forget. "

"I shall go to Spain . . . " A piece of shrapnel ripped past Martin's ear, cutting off the sentence. 

"Name of God! It's getting hot. . . . Spain: I know Spain. " Theartilleryman jumped up and began dancing, Spanish fashion, snapping hisfingers, his big moustaches swaying and trembling. Several shells burstdown the road in quick succession, filling the air with a whine offragments. 

"A cook waggon got it!" the artilleryman shouted, dancing on. "Tra-la lala-la-la-la, la-la la, " he sang, snapping his fingers. 

He stopped and spat again. 

"What do I care?" he said. "Well, so long, old chap. I must go. . . . Say, let's change knives--a little souvenir. "

"Great. "

"Good luck. "

The artilleryman strode off through the woods, past the portable fencethat surrounded the huddled wooden crosses of the graveyard. 

 * * * * *

Against the red glare of the dawn the wilderness of shattered treesstands out purple, hidden by grey mist in the hollows, looped and drapedfantastically with strands of telephone wire and barbed wire, tangledlike leafless creepers, that hang in clots against the red sky. Here andthere guns squat among piles of shells covered with mottled greencheese-cloth, and spit long tongues of yellow flame against the sky. Theambulance waits by the side of the rutted road littered with tin cansand brass shell-cases, while a doctor and two stretcher-bearers bendover a man on a stretcher laid among the underbrush. The man groans andthere is a sound of ripping bandages. On the other side of the road afallen mule feebly wags its head from side to side, a mass of purplefroth hanging from its mouth and wide-stretched scarlet nostrils. 

There is a new smell in the wind, a smell unutterably sordid, like thesmell of the poor immigrants landing at Ellis Island. Martin Howeglances round and sees advancing down the road ranks and ranks ofstrange grey men whose mushroom-shaped helmets give an eerie look as ofmen from the moon in a fairy tale. 

"Why, they're Germans, " he says to himself; "I'd quite forgotten theyexisted. "

"Ah, they're prisoners. " The doctor gets to his feet and glances downthe road and then turns to his work again. 

The tramp of feet marching in unison on the rough shell-pitted road, andpiles and piles of grey men clotted with dried mud, from whom comes thenew smell, the sordid, miserable smell of the enemy. 

"Things going well?" Martin asks a guard, a man with ashen face and eyesthat burn out of black sockets. 

"How should I know?"

"Many prisoners?"

"How should I know?"

 * * * * *

The captain and the aumonier are taking their breakfast, each sitting ona packing-box with their tin cups and tin plates ranged on the boardpropped up between them. All round red clay, out of which the abri wasexcavated. A smell of antiseptics from the door of the dressing-stationand of lime and latrines mingling with the greasy smell of the movablekitchen not far away. They are eating dessert, slices of pineapplespeared with a knife out of a can. In their manner there is somethingthat makes Martin see vividly two gentlemen in frock-coats dining at atable under the awning of a café on the boulevards. It has a leisurelyceremoniousness, an ease that could exist nowhere else. 

"No, my friend, " the doctor is saying, "I do not think that anapprehension of religion existed in the mind of palæolithic man. "

"But, my captain, don't you think that you scientific people sometimeslose a little of the significance of things, insisting always on theirscientific, in this case on their anthropological, aspect?"

"Not in the least; it is the only way to look at them. "

"There are other ways, " says the aumonier, smiling. 

"One moment. . . . " From under the packing-box the captain produced a smallbottle of anisette. "You'll have a little glass, won't you?"

"With the greatest pleasure. What a rarity here, anisette. "

"But, as I was about to say, take our life here, for an example. " . . . Ashell shrieks overhead and crashes hollowly in the woods behind thedugout. Another follows it, exploding nearer. The captain picks a fewbits of gravel off the table, reaches for his helmet and continues. "Forexample, our life here, which is, as was the life of palæolithic man, taken up only with the bare struggle for existence against overwhelmingodds. You know yourself that it is not conducive to religion or anyemotion except that of preservation. "

"I hardly admit that. . . . Ah, I saved it, " the aumonier announces, catching the bottle of anisette as it is about to fall off the table. Anexploding shell rends the air about them. There is a pause, and a showerof earth and gravel tumbles about their ears. 

"I must go and see if anyone was hurt, " says the aumonier, clambering upthe clay bank to the level of the ground; "but you will admit, mycaptain, that the sentiment of preservation is at least akin to thefundamental feelings of religion. "

"My dear friend, I admit nothing. . . . Till this evening, good-bye. " Hewaves his hand and goes into the dugout. 

 * * * * *

Martin and two French soldiers drinking sour wine in the doorway of adeserted house. It was raining outside and now and then a drippingcamion passed along the road, slithering through the mud. 

"This is the last summer of the war. . . . It must be, " said the little manwith large brown eyes and a childish, chubby brown face, who sat onMartin's left. 

"Why?"

"Oh, I don't know. Everyone feels like that. "

"I don't see, " said Martin, "why it shouldn't last for ten or twentyyears. Wars have before. . . . "

"How long have you been at the front?"

"Six months, off and on. "

"After another six months you'll know why it can't go on. "

"I don't know; it suits me all right, " said the man on the other side ofMartin, a man with a jovial red rabbit-like face. "Of course, I don'tlike being dirty and smelling and all that, but one gets accustomed toit. "

"But you are an Alsatian; you don't care. "

"I was a baker. They're going to send me to Dijon soon to bake armybread. It'll be a change. There'll be wine and lots of little girls. Good God, how drunk I'll be; and, old chap, you just watch me with thewomen. . . . "

"I should just like to get home and not be ordered about, " said thefirst man. "I've been lucky, though, " he went on; "I've been kept mostof the time in reserve. I only had to use my bayonet once. "

"When was that?" asked Martin. 

"Near Mont Cornélien, last year. We put them to the bayonet and I wasrunning and a man threw his arms up just in front of me saying, 'Monami, mon ami, ' in French. I ran on because I couldn't stop, and I heardmy bayonet grind as it went through his chest. I tripped over somethingand fell down. "

"You were scared, " said the Alsatian. 

"Of course I was scared. I was trembling all over like an old dog in athunderstorm. When I got up, he was lying on his side with his mouthopen and blood running out, my bayonet still sticking into him. You knowyou have to put your foot against a man and pull hard to get the bayonetout. "

"And if you're good at it, " cried the Alsatian, "you ought to yank itout as your Boche falls and be ready for the next one. The time theygave me the Croix de Guerre I got three in succession, just like atdrill. "

"Oh, I was so sorry I had killed him, " went on the other Frenchman. "When I went through his pockets I found a post-card. Here it is; I haveit. " He pulled out a cracked and worn leather wallet, from which he tooka photograph and a bunch of pictures. "Look, this photograph was there, too. It hurt my heart. You see, it's a woman and two little girls. Theylook so nice. . . . It's strange, but I have two children, too, only one'sa boy. I lay down on the ground beside him--I was all in--and listenedto the machine-guns tapping put, put, put, put, put, all round. I wishedI'd let him kill me instead. That was funny, wasn't it?"

"It's idiotic to feel like that. Put them to the bayonet, all of them, the dirty Boches. Why, the only money I've had since the war began, except my five sous, was fifty francs I found on a German officer. Iwonder where he got it, the old corpse-stripper. "

"Oh, it's shameful! I am ashamed of being a man. Oh, the shame, theshame . . . " The other man buried his face in his hands. 

"I wish they were serving out gniolle for an attack right now, " said theAlsatian, "or the gniolle without the attack 'd be better yet. "

"Wait here, " said Martin, "I'll go round to the copé and get a bottle offizzy. We'll drink to peace or war, as you like. Damn this rain!"

 * * * * *

"It's a shame to bury those boots, " said the sergeant of thestretcher-bearers. 

From the long roll of blanket on the ground beside the hastily-dug graveprotruded a pair of high boots, new and well polished as if for parade. All about the earth was scarred with turned clay like raw wounds, andthe tilting arms of little wooden crosses huddled together, with hereand there a bent wreath or a faded bunch of flowers. 

Overhead in the stripped trees a bird was singing. 

"Shall we take them off? It's a shame to bury a pair of boots likethat. "

"So many poor devils need boots. "

"Boots cost so dear. "

Already two men were lowering the long bundle into the grave. 

"Wait a minute; we've got a coffin for him. "

A white board coffin was brought. 

The boots thumped against the bottom as they put the big bundle in. 

An officer strode into the enclosure of the graveyard, flicking hisknees with a twig. 

"Is this Lieutenant Dupont?" he asked of the sergeant. 

"Yes, my lieutenant. "

"Can you see his face?" The officer stooped and pulled apart the blanketwhere the head was. 

"Poor René, " he said. "Thank you. Good-bye, " and strode out of thegraveyard. 

The yellowish clay fell in clots on the boards of the coffin. Thesergeant bared his head and the aumonier came up, opening his book witha vaguely professional air. 

"It was a shame to bury those boots. Boots are so dear nowadays, " saidthe sergeant, mumbling to himself as he walked back towards the littlebroad shanty they used as a morgue. 

 * * * * *

Of the house, a little pale salmon-coloured villa, only a shellremained, but the garden was quite untouched; fall roses and bunches ofwhite and pink and violet phlox bloomed there among the long grass andthe intruding nettles. In the centre the round concrete fountain was nolonger full of water, but a few brownish-green toads still inhabited it. The place smelt of box and sweetbriar and yew, and when you lay down onthe grass where it grew short under the old yew tree by the fountain, you could see nothing but placid sky and waving green leaves. MartinHowe and Tom Randolph would spend there the quiet afternoons when theywere off duty, sleeping in the languid sunlight, or chatting lazily, pointing out to each other tiny things, the pattern of snail-shells, theglitter of insects' wings, colours, fragrances that made vivid for themsuddenly beauty and life, all that the shells that shrieked overhead, toexplode on the road behind them, threatened to wipe out. 

One afternoon Russell joined them, a tall young man with thin face andaquiline nose and unexpectedly light hair. 

"Chef says we may go en repos in three days, " he said, throwing himselfon the ground beside the other two. 

"We've heard that before, " said Tom Randolph. "Division hasn't startedout yet, ole boy; an' we're the last of the division. "

"God, I'll be glad to go. . . . I'm dead, " said Russell. 

"I was up all last night with dysentery. "

"So was I. . . . It was not funny; first it'd be vomiting, and thendiarrhoea, and then the shells'd start coming in. Gave me a merry timeof it. "

"They say it's the gas, " said Martin. 

"God, the gas! Turns me sick to think of it, " said Russell, stroking hisforehead with his hand. "Did I tell you about what happened to me thenight after the attack, up in the woods?"

"No. "

"Well, I was bringing a load of wounded down from P. J. Right and I'd gotjust beyond the corner where the little muddy hill is--you know, wherethey're always shelling--when I found the road blocked. It was soGod-damned black you couldn't see your hand in front of you. A camion'dgone off the road and another had run into it, and everything waslittered with boxes of shells spilt about. "

"Must have been real nice, " said Randolph. 

"The devilish part of it was that I was all alone. Coney was too sickwith diarrhoea to be any use, so I left him up at the post, runningout at both ends like he'd die. Well . . . I yelled and shouted like hellin my bad French and blew my whistle and sweated, and the damned woundedinside moaned and groaned. And the shells were coming in so thick Ithought my number'd turn up any time. An' I couldn't get anybody. So Ijust climbed up in the second camion and backed it off into thebushes. . . . God, I bet it'll take a wrecking crew to get it out. . . . "

"That was one good job. 

"But there I was with another square in the road and no chance to passthat I could see in that darkness. Then what I was going to tell youabout happened. I saw a little bit of light in a ditch beside a big carthat seemed to be laying on its side, and I went down to it and therewas a bunch of camion drivers, sitting round a lantern drinking. 

"'Hello, have a drink!' they called out to me, and one of them got up, waving his arms, ravin' drunk, and threw his arms around me and kissedme on the mouth. His hair and beard were full of wet mud. . . . Then hedragged me into the crowd. 

"'Ha, here's a copain come to die with us, ' he cried. 

"I gave him a shove and he fell down. But another one got up and handedme a tin cup full of that God-damned gniolle, that I drank not to make'em sore. Then they all shouted, and stood about me, sayin', 'American'sgoin' to die with us. He's goin' to drink with us. He's goin' to diewith us. ' And the shells comin' in all the while. God, I was scared. 

"'I want to get a camion moved to the side of the road. . . . Good-bye, ' Isaid. There didn't seem any use talkin' to them. 

"'But you've come to stay with us, ' they said, and made me drink somemore booze. 'You've come to die with us. Remember you said so. '

"The sweat was running into my eyes so's I could hardly see. I told 'emI'd be right back and slipped away into the dark. Then I thought I'dnever get the second camion cranked. At last I managed it and put it soI could squeeze past, but they saw me and jumped up on the running-boardof the ambulance, tried to stop the car, all yellin' at once, 'It's nouse, the road's blocked both ways. You can't pass. You'd better stay anddie with us. Caput. '

"Well, I put my foot on the accelerator and hit one of them so hard withthe mudguard he fell into the lantern and put it out. Then I got away. An' how I got past the stuff in that road afterwards was just luck. Icouldn't see a God-damn thing; it was so black and I was so nerved up. God, I'll never forget these chaps' shoutin', 'Here's a feller come todie with us. '"

"Whew! That's some story, " said Randolph. 

"That'll make a letter home, won't it?" said Russell, smiling. "Guess mygirl'll think I'm heroic enough after that. "

Martin's eyes were watching a big dragonfly with brown body and creamand rainbow wings that hovered over the empty fountain and the threeboys stretched on the grass, and was gone against the azure sky. 

 * * * * *

The prisoner had grey flesh, so grimed with mud that you could not tellif he were young or old. His uniform hung in a formless clot of mudabout a slender frame. They had treated him at the dressing-station fora gash in his upper arm, and he was being used to help thestretcher-bearers. Martin sat in the front seat of the ambulance, watching him listlessly as he walked down the rutted road under the tornshreds of camouflage that fluttered a little in the wind. Martinwondered what he was thinking. Did he accept all this stench and filthand degradation of slavery as part of the divine order of things? Or didhe too burn with loathing and revolt?

And all those men beyond the hill and the wood, what were they thinking?But how could they think? The lies they were drunk on would keep themeternally from thinking. They had never had any chance to think untilthey were hurried into the jaws of it, where was no room but forlaughter and misery and the smell of blood. 

The rutted road was empty now. Most of the batteries were quiet. Overhead in the brilliant sky aeroplanes snored monotonously. 

The woods all about him were a vast rubbish-heap; the jagged, splinteredboles of leafless trees rose in every direction from heaps of brassshell-cases, of tin cans, of bits of uniform and equipment. The windcame in puffs laden with an odour as of dead rats in an attic. And thiswas what all the centuries of civilisation had struggled for. For thishad generations worn away their lives in mines and factories and forges, in fields and workshops, toiling, screwing higher and higher the tensionof their minds and muscles, polishing brighter and brighter the mirrorof their intelligence. For this!

The German prisoner and another man had appeared in the road again, carrying a stretcher between them, walking with the slow, meticuloussteps of great fatigue. A series of shells came in, like three cracks ofa whip along the road. Martin followed the stretcher-bearers into thedugout. 

The prisoner wiped the sweat from his grime-streaked forehead, andstarted up the step of the dugout again, a closed stretcher on hisshoulder. Something made Martin look after him as he strolled down therutted road. He wished he knew German so that he might call after theman and ask him what manner of a man he was. 

Again, like snapping of a whip, three shells flashed yellow as theyexploded in the brilliant sunlight of the road. The slender figure ofthe prisoner bent suddenly double, like a pocket-knife closing, and laystill. Martin ran out, stumbling in the hard ruts. In a soft child'svoice the prisoner was babbling endlessly, contentedly. Martin kneeledbeside him and tried to lift him, clasping him round the chest under thearms. He was very hard to lift, for his legs dragged limply in theirsoaked trousers, where the blood was beginning to saturate the muddycloth, stickily. Sweat dripped from Martin's face, on the man's face, and he felt the arm-muscles and the ribs pressed against his body as heclutched the wounded man tightly to him in the effort of carrying himtowards the dugout. The effort gave Martin a strange contentment. It wasas if his body were taking part in the agony of this man's body. At lastthey were washed out, all the hatreds, all the lies, in blood and sweat. Nothing was left but the quiet friendliness of beings alike in everypart, eternally alike. 

Two men with a stretcher came from the dugout, and Martin laid the man'sbody, fast growing limper, less animated, down very carefully. 

As he stood by the car, wiping the blood off his hands with an oily rag, he could still feel the man's ribs and the muscles of the man's armagainst his side. It made him strangely happy. 

 * * * * *

At the end of the dugout a man was drawing short, hard breath as if he'dbeen running. There was the accustomed smell of blood and chloride andbandages and filthy miserable flesh. Howe lay on a stretcher wrapped inhis blanket, with his coat over him, trying to sleep. There was verylittle light from a smoky lamp down at the end where the wounded were. The French batteries were fairly quiet, but the German shells werecombing through the woods, coming in series of three and four, graduallynearing the dugout and edging away again. Howe saw the woods as agambling table on which, throw after throw, scattered the random dice ofdeath. 

He pulled his blanket up round his head. He must sleep. How silly tothink about it. It was luck. If a shell had his number on it he'd begone before the words were out of his mouth. How silly that he might bedead any minute! What right had a nasty little piece of tinware to gotearing through his rich, feeling flesh, extinguishing it?

Like the sound of a mosquito in his ear, only louder, more vicious, ashell-shriek shrilled to the crash. 

Damn! How foolish, how supremely silly that tired men somewhere away inthe woods the other side of the lines should be shoving a shell into thebreach of a gun to kill him, Martin Howe!

Like dice thrown on a table, shells burst about the dugout, now oneside, now the other. 

"Seem to have taken a fancy to us this evenin', " Howe heard TomRandolph's voice from the bunk opposite. 

"One, " muttered Martin to himself, as he lay frozen with fear, flat onhis back, biting his trembling lips, "two. . . . God, that was near!"

A dragging instant of suspense, and the shriek growing loud out of thedistance. 

"This is us. " He clutched the sides of the stretcher. 

A snorting roar rocked the dugout. Dirt fell in his face. He lookedabout, dazed. The lamp was still burning. One of the wounded men, with abandage like an Arab's turban about his head, sat up in his stretcherwith wide, terrified eyes. 

"God watches over drunkards and the feeble-minded. Don't let's worry, Howe, " shouted Randolph from his bunk. 

"That probably bitched car No. 4 for evermore, " he answered, turning onhis stretcher, relieved for some reason from the icy suspense. 

"We should worry! We'll foot it home, that's all. "

The casting of the dice began again, farther away this time. 

"We won that throw, " thought Martin. 

CHAPTER VIII

Ducks quacking woke Martin. For a moment he could not think where hewas; then he remembered. The rafters of the loft of the farmhouse overhis head were hung with bunches of herbs drying. He lay a long while onhis back looking at them, sniffing the sweetened air, while farmyardsounds occupied his ears, hens cackling, the grunting of pigs, therou-cou-cou-cou, rou-cou-cou-cou of pigeons under the eaves. Hestretched himself and looked about him. He was alone except for TomRandolph, who slept in a pile of blankets next to the wall, his head, with its close-cropped black hair, pillowed on his bare arm. Martinslipped off the canvas cot he had slept on and went to the window of theloft, a little square open at the level of the floor, through which camea dazzle of blue and gold and green. He looked out. Stables andhay-barns filled two sides of the farmyard below him. Behind them was amass of rustling oak-trees. On the lichen-greened tile roofs pigeonsstrutted about, putting their coral feet daintily one before the other, puffing out their glittering breasts. He breathed deep of the smell ofhay and manure and cows and of unpolluted farms. 

From the yard came a riotous cackling of chickens and quacking of ducks, mingled with the peeping of the little broods. In the middle a girl inblue gingham, sleeves rolled up as far as possible on her brown arms, agirl with a mass of dark hair loosely coiled above the nape of her neck, was throwing to the fowls handfuls of grain with a wide gesture. 

"And to think that only yesterday . . . " said Martin to himself. Helistened carefully for some time. "Wonderful! You can't even hear theguns. "

CHAPTER IX

The evening was pearl-grey when they left the village; in their nostrilswas the smell of the leisurely death of the year, of leaves drying andfalling, of ripened fruit and bursting seed-pods. 

"The fall's a maddening sort o' time for me, " said Tom Randolph. "Itmakes me itch to get up on ma hind legs an' do things, go places. "

"I suppose it's that the earth has such a feel of accomplishment, " saidHowe. 

"You do feel as if Nature had pulled off her part of the job and wasrestin'. "

They stopped a second and looked about them, breathing deep. On one sideof the road were woods where in long alleys the mists deepened intopurple darkness. 

"There's the moon. "

"God! it looks like a pumpkin. "

"I wish those guns'd shut up 'way off there to the north. "

"They're sort of irrelevant, aren't they?"

They walked on, silent, listening to the guns throbbing far away, likemuffled drums beaten in nervous haste. 

"Sounds almost like a barrage. "

Martin for some reason was thinking of the last verses of Shelley's_Hellas_. He wished he knew them so that he could recite them. 

 "_Faiths and empires gleam Like wrecks in a dissolving dream. _"

The purple trunks of saplings passed slowly across the broad face of themoon as they walked along. How beautiful the world was!

"Look, Tom. " Martin put his arm about Randolph's shoulder and noddedtowards the moon. "It might be a ship with puffed-out pumpkin-colouredsails, the way the trees make it look now. "

"Wouldn't it be great to go to sea?" said Randolph, looking straightinto the moon, "an' get out of this slaughter-house. It's nice to seethe war, but I have no intention of taking up butchery as aprofession. . . . There is too much else to do in the world. "

They walked slowly along the road talking of the sea, and Martin toldhow when he was a little kid he'd had an uncle who used to tell himabout the Vikings and the Swan Path, and how one of the great moments ofhis life had been when he and a friend had looked out of their window ina little inn on Cape Cod one morning and seen the sea and the swayinggold path of the sun on it, stretching away, beyond the horizon. 

"Poor old life, " he said. "I'd expected to do so much with you. " Andthey both laughed, a little bitterly. 

They were strolling past a large farmhouse that stood like a hen amongchicks in a crowd of little outbuildings. A man in the road lit acigarette and Martin recognised him in the orange glare of the match. 

"Monsieur Merrier!" He held out his hand. It was the aspirant he haddrunk beer with weeks ago at Brocourt. 

"Hah! It's you!"

"So you are en repos here, too?"

"Yes, indeed. But you two come in and see us; we are dying of theblues. "

"We'd love to stop in for a second. "

A fire smouldered in the big hearth of the farmhouse kitchen, sending alittle irregular fringe of red light out over the tiled floor. At theend of the room towards the door three men were seated round a table, smoking. A candle threw their huge and grotesque shadows on the floorand on the whitewashed walls, and lit up the dark beams of that part ofthe ceiling. The three men got up and everyone shook hands, filling theroom with swaying giant shadows. Champagne was brought and tin cups andmore candles, and the Americans were given the two most comfortablechairs. 

"It's such a find to have Americans who speak French, " said a beardedman with unusually large brilliant eyes. He had been introduced as AndréDubois, "a very terrible person, " had added Merrier, laughing. The corkpopped out of the bottle he had been struggling with. 

"You see, we never can find out what you think about things. . . . All wecan do is to be sympathetically inane, and _vive les braves alliés_ andthat sort of stuff. "

"I doubt if we Americans do think, " said Martin. 

"Cigarettes, who wants some cigarettes?" cried Lully, a small man with avery brown oval face to which long eyelashes and a little bit of silkyblack moustache gave almost a winsomeness. When he laughed he showedbrilliant, very regular teeth. As he handed the cigarettes about helooked searchingly at Martin with eyes disconcertingly intense. "Merrierhas told us about you, " he said. "You seem to be the first Americanwe've met who agreed with us. "

"What about?"

"About the war, of course. "

"Yes, " took up the fourth man, a blonde Norman with an impressive, rather majestic face, "we were very interested. You see, we bore eachother, talking always among ourselves. . . . I hope you won't be offendedif I agree with you in saying that Americans never think. I've been inTexas, you see. "

"Really?"

"Yes, I went to a Jesuit College in Dallas. I was preparing to enter theSociety of Jesus. "

"How long have you been in the war?" asked André Dubois, passing hishand across his beard. 

"We've both been in the same length of time--about six months. "

"Do you like it?"

"I don't have a bad time. . . . But the people in Boccaccio managed toenjoy themselves while the plague was at Florence. That seems to me theonly way to take the war. "

"We have no villa to take refuge in, though, " said Dubois, "and we haveforgotten all our amusing stories. "

"And in America--they like the war?"

"They don't know what it is. They are like children. They believeeverything they are told, you see; they have had no experience ininternational affairs, like you Europeans. To me our entrance into thewar is a tragedy. "

"It's sort of goin' back on our only excuse for existing, " put inRandolph. 

"In exchange for all the quiet and the civilisation and the beauty ofordered lives that Europeans gave up in going to the new world we gavethem opportunity to earn luxury, and, infinitely more important, freedomfrom the past, that gangrened ghost of the past that is killing Europeto-day with its infection of hate and greed of murder. 

"America has turned traitor to all that, you see; that's the way we lookat it. Now we're a military nation, an organised pirate like France andEngland and Germany. "

"But American idealism? The speeches, the notes?" cried Lully, catchingthe edge of the table with his two brown hands. 

"Camouflage, " said Martin. 

"You mean it's insincere?"

"The best camouflage is always sincere. " Dubois ran his hands throughhis hair. 

"Of course, why should there be any difference?" he said. 

"Oh, we're all dupes, we're all dupes. Look, Lully, old man, fill up theAmericans' glasses. "

"Thanks. "

"And I used to believe in liberty, " said Martin. He raised his tumblerand looked at the candle through the pale yellow champagne. On the wallbehind him, his arm and hand and the tumbler were shadowed huge in duskylavender blue. He noticed that his was the only tumbler. 

"I am honoured, " he said; "mine is the only glass. "

"And that's looted, " said Merrier. 

"It's funny . . . " Martin suddenly felt himself filled with a desire totalk. "All my life I've struggled for my own liberty in my small way. Now I hardly know if the thing exists. "

"Exists? Of course it does, or people wouldn't hate it so, " cried Lully. 

"I used to think, " went on Martin, "that it was my family I must escapefrom to be free; I mean all the conventional ties, the worship ofsuccess and the respectabilities that is drummed into you when you'reyoung. "

"I suppose everyone has thought that. . . . "

"How stupid we were before the war, how we prated of small revolts, howwe sniggered over little jokes at religion and government. And all thewhile, in the infinite greed, in the infinite stupidity of men, this wasbeing prepared. " André Dubois was speaking, puffing nervously at acigarette between phrases, now and then pulling at his beard with along, sinewy hand. 

"What terrifies me rather is their power to enslave our minds, " Martinwent on, his voice growing louder and surer as his idea carried himalong. "I shall never forget the flags, the menacing, exultant flagsalong all the streets before we went to war, the gradual unbaring ofteeth, gradual lulling to sleep of people's humanity and sense by thephrases, the phrases. . . . America, as you know, is ruled by the press. And the press is ruled by whom? Who shall ever know what dark forcesbought and bought until we should be ready to go blinded and gagged towar?. . . People seem to so love to be fooled. Intellect used to meanfreedom, a light struggling against darkness. Now the darkness is usingthe light for its own purposes. . . . We are slaves of bought intellect, willing slaves. "

"But, Howe, the minute you see that and laugh at it, you're not a slave. Laugh and be individually as decent as you can, and don't worry yourhead about the rest of the world; and have a good time in spite of theGod-damned scoundrels, " broke out Randolph in English. "No use worryingyourself into the grave over a thing you can't help. "

"There is one solution and one only, my friends, " said the blondeNorman; "the Church. . . . " He sat up straight in his chair, speakingslowly with expressionless face. "People are too weak and too kindly toshift for themselves. Government of some sort there must be. LayGovernment has proved through all the tragic years of history to bemerely a ruse of the strong to oppress the weak, of the wicked to foolthe confiding. There remains only religion. In the organisation ofreligion lies the natural and suitable arrangement for the happiness ofman. The Church will govern not through physical force but throughspiritual force. "

"The force of fear. " Lully jumped to his feet impatiently, making thebottles sway on the table. 

"The force of love. . . . I once thought as you do, my friend, " said theNorman, pulling Lully back into his chair with a smile. 

Lully drank a glass of champagne greedily and undid the buttons of hisblue jacket. 

"Go on, " he said; "it's madness. "

"All the evil of the Church, " went on the Norman's even voice, "comesfrom her struggles to attain supremacy. Once assured of triumph, established as the rule of the world, it becomes the natural channelthrough which the wise rule and direct the stupid, not for their owninterest, not for ambition for worldly things, but for the love that isin them. The freedom the Church offers is the only true freedom. Itdenies the world, and the slaveries and rewards of it. It gives the loveof God as the only aim of life. "

"But think of the Church to-day, the cardinals at Rome, the Churchturned everywhere to the worship of tribal gods. . . . "

"Yes, but admit that that can be changed. The Church has been supreme inthe past; can it not again be supreme? All the evil comes from thestruggle, from the compromise. Picture to yourself for a moment a worldconquered by the Church, ruled through the soul and mind, where forcewill not exist, where instead of all the multitudinous tyrannies man haschoked his life with in organising against other men, will exist the onesupreme thing, the Church of God. Instead of many hatreds, one love. Instead of many slaveries, one freedom. "

"A single tyranny, instead of a million. What's the choice?" criedLully. 

"But you are both violent, my children. " Merrier got to his feet andsmilingly filled the glasses all round. "You go at the matter too muchfrom the heroic point of view. All this sermonising does no good. We arevery simple people who want to live quietly and have plenty to eat andhave no one worry us or hurt us in the little span of sunlight before wedie. All we have now is the same war between the classes: those thatexploit and those that are exploited. The cunning, unscrupulous peoplecontrol the humane, kindly people. This war that has smashed our littleEuropean world in which order was so painfully taking the place ofchaos, seems to me merely a gigantic battle fought over the plunder ofthe world by the pirates who have grown fat to the point of madness onthe work of their own people, on the work of the millions in Africa, inIndia, in America, who have come directly or indirectly under the yokeof the insane greed of the white races. Well, our edifice is ruined. Let's think no more of it. Ours is now the duty of rebuilding, reorganising. I have not faith enough in human nature to be ananarchist. . . . We are too like sheep; we must go in flocks, and a flockto live must organise. There is plenty for everyone, even with the hugegrowth in population all over the world. What we want is organisationfrom the bottom, organisation by the ungreedy, by the humane, by theuncunning, socialism of the masses that shall spring from the naturalneed of men to help one another; not socialism from the top to the endsof the governors, that they may clamp us tighter in their fetters. Wemust stop the economic war, the war for existence of man against man. That will be the first step in the long climb to civilisation. They mustco-operate, they must learn that it is saner and more advantageous tohelp one another than to hinder one another in the great war againstnature. And the tyranny of the feudal money lords, the unspeakablemisery of this war is driving men closer together into fraternity, co-operation. It is the lower classes, therefore, that the new worldmust be founded on. The rich must be extinguished; with them warswill die. First between rich and poor, between the exploiter andthe exploited. . . . "

"They have one thing in common, " interrupted the blonde Norman, smiling. 

"What's that?"

"Humanity. . . . That is, feebleness, cowardice. "

"No, indeed. All through the world's history there has been one law forthe lord and another for the slave, one humanity for the lord andanother humanity for the slave. What we must strive for is a trueuniversal humanity. "

"True, " cried Lully, "but why take the longest, the most difficult road?You say that people are sheep; they must be driven. I say that you and Iand our American friends here are not sheep. We are capable of standingalone, of judging all for ourselves, and we are just ordinary peoplelike anyone else. "

"Oh, but look at us, Lully!" interrupted Merrier. "We are too weak andtoo cowardly . . . "

"An example, " said Martin, excitedly leaning across the table. "We noneof us believe that war is right or useful or anything but a hideousmethod of mutual suicide. Have we the courage of our own faith?"

"As I said, " Merrier took up again, "I have too little faith to be ananarchist, but I have too much to believe in religion. " His tin cuprapped sharply on the table as he set it down. 

"No, " Lully continued, after a pause, "it is better for man to worshipGod, his image on the clouds, the creation of his fancy, than to worshipthe vulgar apparatus of organised life, government. Better sacrifice hischildren to Moloch than to that society for the propagation andprotection of commerce, the nation. Oh, think of the cost of governmentin all the ages since men stopped living in marauding tribes! Think ofthe great men martyred. Think of the thought trodden into the dust. . . . Give man a chance for once. Government should be purely utilitarian, like the electric light wires in a house. It is a method for attainingpeace and comfort--a bad one, I think, at that; not a thing to beworshipped as God. The one reason for it is the protection of property. Why should we have property? That is the central evil of the world. . . . That is the cancer that has made life a hell of misery until now; theinflated greed of it has spurred on our nations of the West to throwthemselves back, for ever, perhaps, into the depths of savagery. . . . Oh, if people would only trust their own fundamental kindliness, thefraternity, the love that is the strongest thing in life. Abolishproperty, and the disease of the desire for it, the desire to grasp andhave, and you'll need no government to protect you. The vividness andresiliency of the life of man is being fast crushed under organisation, tabulation. Over-organisation is death. It is disorganisation, notorganisation, that is the aim of life. "

"I grant that what all of you say is true, but why say it over and overagain?" André Dubois talked, striding back and forth beside the table, his arms gesticulating. His compound shadow thrown by the candles on thewhite wall followed him back and forth, mocking him with huge blurredgestures. "The Greek philosophers said it and the Indian sages. Ourdescendants thousands of years from now will say it and wring theirhands as we do. Has not someone on earth the courage to act?. . . " The menat the table turned towards him, watching his tall figure move back andforth. 

"We are slaves. We are blind. We are deaf. Why should we argue, we whohave no experience of different things to go on? It has always been thesame: man the slave of property or religion, of his own shadow. . . . Firstwe must burst our bonds, open our eyes, clear our ears. Now we knownothing but what we are told by the rulers. Oh, the lies, the lies, thelies, the lies that life is smothered in! We must strike once more forfreedom, for the sake of the dignity of man. Hopelessly, cynically, ruthlessly we must rise and show at least that we are not taken in; thatwe are slaves but not willing slaves. Oh, they have deceived us so manytimes. We have been such dupes, we have been such dupes!"

"You are right, " said the blonde Norman sullenly; "we have all beendupes. "

A sudden self-consciousness chilled them all to silence for a while. Without wanting to, they strained their ears to hear the guns. Therethey were, throbbing loud, unceasing, towards the north, like hastymuffled drum-beating. 

 _Cease; drain not to its dregs the wine, Of bitter Prophecy. The world is weary of its past. Oh, might it die or rest at last. _

All through the talk snatches from _Hellas_ had been running throughHowe's head. 

After a long pause he turned to Merrier and asked him how he had faredin the attack. 

"Oh, not so badly. I brought my skin back, " said Merrier, laughing. "Itwas a dull business. After waiting eight hours under gas bombardment wegot orders to advance, and so over we went with the barrage way ahead ofus. There was no resistance where we were. We took a lot of prisonersand blew up some dugouts and I had the good luck to find a lot of Germanchocolate. It came in handy, I can tell you, as no ravitaillement camefor two days. We just had biscuits and I toasted the biscuits andchocolate together and had quite good meals, though I nearly died ofthirst afterwards. . . . We lost heavily, though, when they startedcounter-attacking. "

"An' no one of you were touched?"

"Luck. . . . But we lost many dear friends. Oh, it's always like that. "

"Look what I brought back--a German gun, " said André Dubois, going tothe corner of the room. 

"That's some souvenir, " said Tom Randolph, sitting up suddenly, shakinghimself out of the reverie he had been sunk in all through the talk ofthe evening. 

"And I have three hundred rounds. They'll come in handy some day. "

"When?"

"In the revolution--after the war. "

"That's the stuff I like to hear, " cried Randolph, getting to his feet. "Why wait for the war to end?"

"Why? Because we have not the courage. . . . But it is impossible untilafter the war. "

"And then you think it is possible?"

"Yes. "

"Will it accomplish anything?"

"God knows. "

"One last bottle of champagne, " cried Merrier. 

They seated themselves round the table again. Martin took in at a glancethe eager sunburned faces, the eyes burning with hope, withdetermination, and a sudden joy flared through him. 

"Oh, there is hope, " he said, drinking down his glass. "We are tooyoung, too needed to fail. We must find a way, find the first step of away to freedom, or life is a hollow mockery. "

"To Revolution, to Anarchy, to the Socialist state, " they all cried, drinking down the last of the champagne. All the candles but one hadguttered out. Their shadows swayed and darted in long arms and changing, grotesque limbs about the room. 

"But first there must be peace, " said the Norman, Jean Chenier, twistinghis mouth into a faintly bitter smile. 

"Oh, indeed, there must be peace. "

"Of all slaveries, the slavery of war, of armies, is the bitterest, themost hopeless slavery. " Lully was speaking, his smooth brown face in agrimace of excitement and loathing. "War is our first enemy. "

"But oh, my friend, " said Merrier, "we will win in the end. All thepeople in all the armies of the world believe as we do. In all the mindsthe seed is sprouting. "

"Before long the day will come. The tocsin will ring. "

"Do you really believe that?" cried Martin. "Have we the courage, havewe the energy, have we the power? Are we the men our ancestors were?"

"No, " said Dubois, crashing down on the table with his fist; "we aremerely intellectuals. We cling to a mummified world. But they have thepower and the nerve. "

"Who?"

"The stupid average working-people. "

"We only can combat the lies, " said Lully; "they are so easily duped. After the war that is what we must do. "

"Oh, but we are all such dupes, " cried Dubois. "First we must fight thelies. It is the lies that choke us. "

 * * * * *

It was very late. Howe and Tom Randolph were walking home under a coldwhite moon already well sunk in the west; northward was a littleflickering glare above the tops of the low hills and a sound of firingas of muffled drums beaten hastily. 

"With people like that we needn't despair of civilisation, " said Howe. 

"With people who are young and aren't scared you can do lots. "

"We must come over and see those fellows again. It's such a relief to beable to talk. "

"And they give you the idea that something's really going on in theworld, don't they?"

"Oh, it's wonderful! Think that the awakening may come soon. "

"We might wake up to-morrow and . . . "

"It's too important to joke about; don't be an ass, Tom. "

They rolled up in their blankets in the silent barn and listened to thedrum-fire in the distance. Martin saw again, as he lay on his side withhis eyes closed, the group of men in blue uniforms, men with eager brownfaces and eyes gleaming with hope, and saw their full red lips moving asthey talked. 

The candle threw the shadows of their heads, huge, fantastic, and oftheir gesticulating arms on the white walls of the kitchen. And itseemed to Martin Howe that all his friends were gathered in that room. 

CHAPTER X

"They say you sell shoe-laces, " said Martin, his eyes blinking in thefaint candlelight. 

Crouched in the end of the dugout was a man with a brown skin likewrinkled leather, and white eyebrows and moustaches. All about him werepiles of old boots, rotten with wear and mud, holding fantastically theimprints of the toes and ankle-bones of the feet that had worn them. Thecandle cast flitting shadows over them so that they seemed to move backand forth faintly, as do the feet of wounded men laid out on the floorof the dressing-station. 

"I'm a cobbler by profession, " said the man. He made a gesture with theblade of his knife in the direction of a huge bundle of leather lacesthat hung from a beam above his head. "I've done all those sinceyesterday. I cut up old boots into laces. "

"Helps out the five sous a bit, " said Martin, laughing. 

"This post is convenient for my trade, " went on the cobbler, as hepicked out another boot to be cut into laces, and started hacking theupper part off the worn sole. "At the little hut, where they pile up thestiffs before they bury them--you know, just to the left outside theabri--they leave lots of their boots around. I can pick up any number Iwant. " With a clasp-knife he was cutting the leather in a spiral, paringoff a thin lace. He contracted his bushy eyebrows as he bent over hiswork. The candlelight glinted on the knife blade as he twisted it aboutdexterously. 

"Yes, many a good copain of mine has had his poor feet in those boots. What of it? Some day another fellow will be making laces out of mine, eh?" He gave a wheezy, coughing laugh. 

"I guess I'll take a pair. How much are they?"

"Six sous. "

"Good. "

The coins glinted in the light of the candle as they clinked in theman's leather-blackened palm. 

"Good-bye, " said Martin. He walked past men sleeping in the bunks oneither side as he went towards the steps. 

At the end of the dugout the man crouched on his pile of old leather, with his knife that glinted in the candlelight dexterously carving lacesout of the boots of those who no longer needed them. 

CHAPTER XI

There is no sound in the poste de secours. A faint greenish lightfilters down from the quiet woods outside. Martin is kneeling beside astretcher where lies a mass of torn blue uniform crossed in severalplaces by strips of white bandages clotted with dark blood. The massiveface, grimed with mud, is very waxy and grey. The light hair hangs inclots about the forehead. The nose is sharp, but there is a faint smileabout the lips made thin by pain. 

"Is there anything I can get you?" asks Martin softly. 

"Nothing. " Slowly the blue eyelids uncover hazel eyes that burnfeverishly. 

"But you haven't told me yet, how's Merrier?"

"A shell . . . Dead . . . Poor chap. "

"And the anarchist, Lully?"

"Dead. "

"And Dubois?"

"Why ask?" came the faint rustling voice peevishly. "Everybody's dead. You're dead, aren't you?"

"No, I'm alive, and you. A little courage. . . . We must be cheerful. "

"It's not for long. To-morrow, the next day. . . . " The blue eyelids slipback over the crazy burning eyes and the face takes on again the waxenlook of death. 

THE END

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