very badly wounded men. They will die in this gas. I've got to get
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 his
thigh 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 greener
on either  side, full of ferns and small  plants that half cover the strands
of barbed wire and the rows of shells.
     At the end  of the woods the sun rises golden into a cloudless sky, and
on the grassy slope of the valley  sheep and  a herd  of little  donkeys are
feeding, looking up with  quietly moving jaws as  the ambulance, smelling of
blood and filthy sweat-soaked clothes, rattles by.


     Black night.  All  through the  woods along the road squatting  mortars
spit yellow 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, except when
the  glare  of a  gun  from near  the road gives him a momentary view of the
man's  head, a  mass  of bandages from the  middle of which a little  bit of
blood-soaked beard sticks out, and of his lean body tossing on the stretcher
with every jolt of the car. Martin is kneeling on the floor of  the car, his
knees bruised  by the jolting,  holding the man on the  stretcher, with  his
chest pressed on the man's chest and one arm stretched down to keep the limp
bandaged leg still.
     The man's breath comes with  a bubbling  sound, now  and then  mingling
with an articulate groan.
     "Softly. . . . Oh, softly, oh--oh--oh!"
     "Slow as you can, Tom, old man," Martin calls out above the pandemonium
of firing on both sides of the road, tightening the muscles  of his arm in a
desperate effort to  keep the limp leg from bouncing. The smell of blood and
filth is misery in his nostrils.
     "Softly. . . . Softly. . .. Oh--oh--oh!" The groan is barely heard amid
the bubbling breath.
     Pitch dark in the car. Martin,  his every muscle taut with the agony of
the 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  from bouncing
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 the lantern.
"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 a
cross-roads. Beside him squatted a ruddy-faced youth with a smudge of grease
on his faintly-hooked nose. A champagne bottle rested against his knees.
     "Yes. I've never been happier in my life. It's a coarse boozing sort of
a life, but I like it."
     They  looked  over  the  landscape of  greyish  rolling  hills  scarred
everywhere by new roads and  ranks of wooden shacks. Along  the road beneath
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 of motors.
     "The last time I saw you," said Martin, after a pause,  "was  early one
morning  on the Cambridge  bridge.  I was walking  out  from Boston, and  we
talked of  the  Eroica they'd  played at the Symphony, and  you said it  was
silly 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 our
lieutenant got the Croix de Guerre.
     Somebody ought to write a book called <i>Heroisms of the Great War</i>. . . ."
     "I  am  sure that many  people have,  and will. You  probably'll do  it
yourself, Will. But go on."
     The sun burst from the huddled clouds  for a moment, mottling the hills
and the  scarred valleys with  light. The  shadow of an aeroplane flying low
passed across the  field, and  the snoring of  its motors  cut out all other
sound.
     "Well, our louie's name's  Duval, but he spells it with a small 'd' and
a big 'V.' He's been wanting a  Croix de Guerre for a hell of a time because
lots  of  fellows in  the  section  have been getting  'em. He tried  giving
dinners to the General Staff and  everything, but that didn't seem to  work.
So there was  nothing to it  but to get wounded.  So he took to going to the
front posts; but the trouble was that it was a hell of a quiet sector and no
shells ever came within a mile of it. At last somebody  made a mistake and a
little Austrian eighty-eight came tumbling  in and popped about fifty  yards
from his staff car. He showed the most marvellous presence of mind, cause he
clapped his hand  over his eye and sank back  in the seat with  a groan. The
doctor  asked what  was the  matter, 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 day with a handkerchief over one eye and a look of heroism in the
other. But never would he let  the doctor even  peep at  it. Next morning he
came out with  a bandage round his head as big as  a sheik's turban. He went
to  see headquarters in  that get-up  and  lunched  with the staff-officers.
Well,  he  got  his  Croix  de  Guerre  all  right--cited  for assuring  the
evacuation of 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 bottle
listlessly  off into  the grass,  where it  struck an  empty shell-case  and
broke.
     "But,  Will,  you  can't  like  this," he  said.  "It's all so like  an
ash-heap, a huge garbage-dump of men and equipment."
     "I suppose  it is .  .  ." said the ruddy-faced youth, discovering  the
grease on his nose and rubbing it off with the back of his hand.
     "Damn those dirty  Fords. They get grease all over you! I suppose it is
that life was so dull in America that anything seems better. I worked a year
in an office before leaving home. Give me the garbage-dump."
     "Look,"  said  Martin,  shading  his  eyes  with his hand  and  staring
straight up into the sky. "There are two planes fighting."
     They both screwed up their eyes to stare  into the sky, where two  bits
of mica were circling. Below them, like wads of  cotton-wool, some white and
others black, were rows  of the smoke-puffs  of shrapnel from  anti-aircraft
guns.
     The  two boys  watched the specks in silence. At last one began to grow
larger,  seemed to  be falling in wide spirals. The other had  vanished. The
falling  aeroplane started  rising again into  the middle sky,  then stopped
suddenly, burst into flames, and fluttered down behind the hills, 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's
bringing in."
     There  was  an explosion and a vicious whine of shrapnel bullets  among
the trees. 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 was another
sharp bang overhead  and a little  reddish-brown cloud that suddenly  spread
and  drifted away among  the quiet tree-tops.  He took  off  his 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 had
rebounded from the helmet and lay at his feet.
     "God  damn,  it's hot,"  he  cried,  dropping  it;  "anyway,  finding's
keepings." 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 heard
a shell-shriek loudening in the distance. Beside him was a tall man with the
crossed cannon  of the  artillery in his  helmet, and a shrunken brown  face
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 a
shell passed overhead to burst in a tree down the road.
     "Now look at that." The man held  up  his musette to Howe. "I've broken
the 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 wet
glass 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,
taste it,  there's still a little."  He held up the neck  of the  bottle and
Martin took a sip.
     The artilleryman drank the rest  of it, twisted his long moustaches and
heaved a deep sigh.
     "Go there, my poor good old wine."  He threw the remnants of the bottle
into  the underbrush. Shrapnel burst a little down the  road. "Oh, this is a
dirty business! I  am a Gascon. .  . . I like to live." He put a dirty brown
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-book held together  by an  elastic band  he  pulled  a  snapshot  of  a
jolly-looking young man with a fleshy face and his hands tucked into the top
of a wide, tightly-wound sash. He looked at the picture, smiling and tugging
at  one  of his  long moustaches.  "Then I  was twenty.  It's  the  war." He
shrugged his  shoulders and put the  picture carefully back into  his inside
pocket. "Oh, it's idiotic!"
     "You must have had a tough time."
     "It's just that people aren't  meant for this  sort ofthing,"  said the
artilleryman  quietly. "You don't get accustomed. The more you see the worse
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  without
you. . . . But we used to know how to live, we Gascons. We worked so hard on
the  vines  and on the fruit-trees, and we kept a  horse and carriage. I had
the best-looking rig in  the department. Sunday  it was fun; we'd play bowls
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 man could put
his  arms around, she was. We'd  go out in my rig. It was click-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 of Montmarieul had a  rig,
too,  but  not so  good as  mine, and my  horse would always pass his in the
road. Oh, it was funny, and he'd look so sour to have  common people like us
pass him in the road. . . . Boom, there's another. . . . And the Marquis now
is nicely embusquÊ in the automobile service. He is stationed at Versailles.
. . . And look at me. . . . But what do I care about all that now?"
     "But after the war . . ."
     "After the  war?" He  spat savagely on the first  step  of the  dugout.
"They learn 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."  The
artilleryman jumped up  and began  dancing,  Spanish fashion,  snapping  his
fingers, his big moustaches swaying and trembling. Several shells burst down
the road in quick succession, filling the air with a whine of fragments.
     "A cook waggon got  it!" the artilleryman  shouted, dancing on. "Tra-la
la la-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 fence
that surrounded the huddled wooden crosses of the graveyard.


     Against  the  red  glare of the dawn the wilderness of shattered  trees
stands out purple,  hidden by grey  mist in the  hollows,  looped and draped
fantastically with strands of telephone wire and barbed wire,  tangled  like
leafless creepers, that  hang  in clots against the red sky. Here and  there
guns  squat among piles of  shells covered with mottled  green cheese-cloth,
and spit long  tongues of yellow flame against  the sky. The ambulance waits
by the side of the rutted road littered with tin cans and brass shell-cases,
while a doctor and two stretcher-bearers bend over a man on a stretcher laid
among  the  underbrush. The man  groans and  there is  a  sound  of  ripping
bandages.  On the other  side of the road a fallen mule feebly wags its head
from  side to side,  a mass of  purple  froth  hanging  from  its mouth  and
wide-stretched scarlet nostrils.
     There is a new smell in the wind, a smell unutterably sordid,  like the
smell of  the poor immigrants landing  at Ellis Island. Martin Howe  glances
round  and sees advancing down the road ranks  and ranks of strange grey men
whose mushroom-shaped helmets give  an eerie look as of men from the moon in
a fairy tale.
     "Why,  they're Germans,"  he says to himself; "I'd quite forgotten they
existed."
     "Ah, they're prisoners."  The  doctor gets to his feet and glances down
the road and then turns to his work again.
     The  tramp of feet marching in unison on  the rough shell-pitted  road,
and piles and  piles of grey men clotted with dried mud, from whom comes the
new smell, the sordid, miserable smell of the enemy.
     "Things going well?" Martin asks  a  guard, a man  with ashen  face and
eyes that 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
on a packing-box with  their  tin cups and  tin plates ranged  on the  board
propped  up between  them. All  round red  clay, out of which  the abri  was
excavated. A smell  of antiseptics from the door of the dressing-station and
of lime and latrines mingling  with the greasy smell  of the movable kitchen
not far away. They  are  eating dessert, slices  of pineapple speared with a
knife out of a can. In their manner there is something that makes Martin see
vividly two gentlemen in frock-coats dining at a table under the awning of a
cafÊ on the boulevards. It has  a leisurely  ceremoniousness,  an ease  that
could exist nowhere else.
     "No,  my friend,"  the  doctor  is  saying, "I  do  not  think that  an
apprehension of religion existed in the mind of palaeolithic man."
     "But, my captain, don't you think that you scientific  people sometimes
lose  a  little  of  the  significance  of things, insisting always on their
scientific, 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
small bottle 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." . . .
A  shell  shrieks  overhead and crashes  hollowly  in the  woods  behind the
dugout.  Another  follows it, exploding nearer. The captain picks a few bits
of gravel off the table, reaches for his helmet and continues. "For example,
our life here, which is, as was the life of palaeolithic man, taken up  only
with  the  bare  struggle  for existence against overwhelming odds. You know
yourself that it  is not conducive to religion or any emotion 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. An
exploding  shell rends the air about them. There is a pause, and a shower of
earth and gravel tumbles about their ears.
     "I  must go and see if anyone was hurt," says  the aumonier, clambering
up  the  clay bank to the  level of  the  ground;  "but you will  admit,  my
captain,  that  the  sentiment  of  preservation is  at  least akin  to  the
fundamental feelings of religion."
     "My dear friend, I admit nothing. . . .  Till this  evening, good-bye."
He waves his hand and goes into the dugout.


     Martin and two French soldiers drinking sour wine in  the  doorway of a
deserted  house. It was raining  outside and  now and then a dripping camion
passed along the road, slithering through the mud.
     "This is the last summer of the war. . . . It must be," said the little
man  with large brown eyes and a  childish,  chubby brown face,  who sat  on
Martin'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 twenty
years. 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
of Martin, a man with a  jovial red  rabbit-like face. "Of course,  I  don't
like being dirty and smelling and all that, but one gets accustomed to it."
     "But you are an Alsatian; you don't care."
     "I  was a baker. They're going  to  send me to Dijon soon to  bake army
bread.  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 the women. . .
"
     "I  should  just like  to get home and not be  ordered about," said the
first man. "I've been  lucky, though," he went  on; "I've been kept  most of
the time in reserve. I only had to use my bayonet once."
     "When was that?" asked Martin.
     "Near Mont CornÊlien, last  year. We put them to the bayonet and  I was
running  and a  man  threw his arms up just in front of me saying, 'Mon ami,
mon ami,' in  French.  I  ran on because I  couldn't stop,  and I  heard  my
bayonet grind  as  it went through his chest. I tripped over  something  and
fell down."
     "You were scared," said the Alsatian.
     "Of  course I was scared. I was trembling all over like an old dog in a
thunderstorm. When I got up,  he was lying  on his side with his mouth  open
and blood running out, my bayonet still sticking into him. You know you have
to put your foot against a man and pull hard to get the bayonet out."
     "And if you're good at it," cried  the Alsatian,  "you ought to yank it
out as your Boche falls and be ready for the next one. The time they gave me
the Croix de Guerre I got three in succession, just like at drill."
     "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 have
it." He pulled out a cracked  and worn leather  wallet, from which he took a
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. They look so
nice. . . . It's strange, but I  have two children, too, only one's a boy. I
lay  down on  the  ground  beside  him--I  was all  in--and listened  to the
machine-guns  tapping put,  put, put, put, put, all round. I wished  I'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. I wonder where
he got it, the old corpse-stripper."
     "Oh,  it's  shameful! I am ashamed of  being  a man. Oh, the shame, the
shame . . ." The other man buried his face in his hands.
     "I wish they were serving out gniolle  for an attack  right now,"  said
the Alsatian, "or the gniolle without the attack'd be better yet."
     "Wait here," said Martin, "I'll go round to  the copÊ and get a  bottle
of fizzy. 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  the
stretcher-bearers.
     From the long roll  of  blanket on  the ground  beside  the hastily-dug
grave  protruded  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,
and  the  tilting arms of little wooden  crosses huddled together, with here
and 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 like
that."
     "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 his
knees 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
blanket where the head was.
     "Poor  Ren,"  he  said.  "Thank you.  Good-bye," and strode  out of the
graveyard.
     The  yellowish  clay fell  in clots  on the  boards of the coffin.  The
sergeant  bared his head and the aumonier came up, opening  his book  with a
vaguely professional air.
     "It was  a shame to bury those boots. Boots are so dear nowadays," said
the sergeant, mumbling to himself as he walked back towards the little broad
shanty they used as a morgue.


     Of  the house,  a  little  pale salmon-coloured  villa,  only  a  shell
remained,  but the  garden was quite  untouched; fall roses and  bunches  of
white and pink and violet phlox bloomed  there  among the long grass and the
intruding nettles. In  the centre  the round concrete fountain was no longer
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 on  the  grass
where it  grew short under the old yew  tree by the  fountain, you could see
nothing but placid sky and waving green leaves. Martin Howe and Tom Randolph
would spend there the quiet afternoons when  they were off duty, sleeping in
the  languid  sunlight, or chatting  lazily, pointing out to each other tiny
things, the pattern of snail-shells, the glitter of insects' wings, colours,
fragrances  that  made vivid for them suddenly beauty and life, all that the
shells  that  shrieked  overhead,  to  explode  on  the  road  behind  them,
threatened to wipe out.
     One afternoon Russell joined them, a tall young man with thin face  and
aquiline nose and unexpectedly light hair.
     "Chef says we may go en repos in three days," he said, throwing himself
on the ground beside the other two.
     "We've heard that before," said Tom Randolph.
     "Division  hasn't started out 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 then
diarrhoea, and then  the shells'd start  coming in. Gave me a merry  time of
it."
     "They say it's the gas," said Martin.
     "God, the  gas! Turns me sick to think  of it,"  said Russell, stroking
his  forehead  with his  hand. "Did I tell you about what happened to me the
night after the attack, up in the woods?"
     "No."
     "Well, I was bringing a  load of wounded down from  P.J.  right and I'd
got just beyond the corner where  the little muddy hill is--you know,  where
they're always shelling--when I found the road blocked. It was so God-damned
black you couldn't see your hand in  front of  you. A camion'd  gone off the
road and another  had run into it, and everything was littered 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 sick
with diarrhoea to be any use, so I left him up at  the post,  running out at
both ends like he'd die. Well . . . I yelled and shouted like hell in my bad
French and blew my whistle and sweated, and the damned wounded inside moaned
and groaned. And  the  shells were coming in so thick I thought  my number'd
turn up any time. An' I couldn't  get anybody. So I just climbed up  in  the
second camion and backed it off into the bushes. . . . 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 pass
that I could see in that darkness. Then what I was going to  tell you  about
happened.  I saw  a little bit of  light in  a ditch beside a  big car  that
seemed to be laying on its side, and I went down to it and there was 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 kissed me on
the mouth. His hair and beard were full of wet mud. . . . Then he dragged 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 handed
me 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's goin'
to die with us. He's goin' to drink with us. He's goin' to die with 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,' I said. There didn't seem any use talkin' to them.
     "'But you've come to stay with us,' they said, and  made  me drink some
more 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 'em
I'd be right back and slipped  away  into the dark. Then I thought I'd never
get the second camion  cranked. At last  I managed it and put it so  I could
squeeze  past,  but they saw me and  jumped up  on the  running-board of the
ambulance, tried  to stop the car,  all yellin' at once, 'It's  no  use, the
road's blocked both ways. You can't pass. You'd better stay and die with us.
Caput.'
     "Well,  I  put my foot on the accelerator and hit  one  of them so hard
with the mud-guard 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.  I
couldn'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 to die with
us.' "
     "Whew! That's some story," said Randolph.
     "That'll make  a  letter home, won't it?" said Russell, smiling. "Guess
my girl'll think I'm heroic enough after that."
     Martin's eyes  were watching a big dragonfly with brown  body and cream
and  rainbow wings that hovered over the  empty  fountain and the three boys
stretched on the grass, and was gone against the azure sky.
     The prisoner had grey flesh, so grimed with mud that you could not tell
if he were young or old. His uniform hung in a formless clot of mud about  a
slender frame. They had  treated him at the dressing-station for a  gash  in
his  upper arm, and he was being used to help  the stretcher-bearers. Martin
sat in the front seat of the ambulance, watching him listlessly as he walked
down the rutted road under the  torn shreds  of camouflage that fluttered  a
little in the wind. Martin  wondered what he was thinking. Did he accept all
this stench and filth and degradation of slavery as part of the divine order
of things? Or did he 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
them eternally  from thinking. They had never had any chance to think  until
they were hurried into the jaws of it, where was no  room  but  for laughter
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,
splintered  boles  of leafless trees rose in every direction  from heaps  of
brass shell-cases,  of tin cans,  of bits of uniform and equipment. The wind
came in puffs laden with an odour as of dead rats in an attic. And  this was
what all  the  centuries  of civilisation  had  struggled for. For  this had
generations  worn  away  their lives in mines and  factories and forges,  in
fields  and work-shops, toiling, screwing higher and  higher  the tension of
their minds and muscles, polishing brighter and brighter the mirror of 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, meticulous steps
of great fatigue.  A series of shells came in, like three cracks  of a  whip
along the road. Martin followed the stretcher-bearers into the dugout.
     The  prisoner wiped  the sweat  from his grime-streaked  forehead,  and
started up the step of the dugout again, a closed stretcher on his shoulder.
Something made Martin look after him as he strolled down the rutted road. He
wished he knew German so  that he might call  after the man and ask him what
manner of a man he was.
     Again, like snapping  of a whip,  three shells  flashed yellow  as they
exploded in the brilliant sunlight  of the road.  The slender  figure of the
prisoner bent suddenly double, like  a pocket-knife  closing, and lay still.
Martin  ran out, stumbling  in the  hard  ruts. In a  soft child's voice the
prisoner was babbling endlessly, contentedly. Martin kneeled beside him  and
tried to lift him, clasping him round the chest under  the arms. He was very
hard to lift, for his  legs dragged limply  in their soaked trousers,  where
the blood was beginning to saturate the muddy cloth, 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 he clutched the wounded man tightly to him
in the effort of carrying him towards the  dugout. The effort  gave Martin a
strange  contentment. It was as if his body were taking part in the agony of
this  man's body. At  last they  were washed  out, all  the hatreds, all the
lies,  in blood  and sweat.  Nothing  was left but the quiet friendliness of
beings alike in every part, eternally alike.
     Two men  with a  stretcher came from  the dugout,  and  Martin laid the
man's body, 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 arm
against his side. It made him strangely happy.


     At the end of the dugout a man was drawing  short,  hard  breath as  if
he'd been running. There was the accustomed smell of blood  and chloride and
bandages and filthy miserable flesh. Howe lay on a  stretcher wrapped in his
blanket,  with  his coat over  him, trying to sleep.  There  was very little
light from a smoky lamp down  at the end where the wounded were. The  French
batteries were fairly quiet, but the German shells  were combing through the
woods, coming in  series of three and four, gradually nearing the dugout and
edging away again.  Howe saw the  woods as a gambling table on  which, throw
after throw, scattered the random dice of death.
     He pulled his blanket up round his  head. He  must sleep.  How silly to
think about it.  It was luck. If a shell had his number on it he'd  be  gone
before the words were out of his mouth. How silly that he  might be dead any
minute! What right had a nasty little piece of tinware to go tearing through
his rich, feeling flesh, extinguishing it?
     Like  the sound of a mosquito in his ear, only louder, more vicious,  a
shell-shriek shrilled to the crash.
     Damn! How foolish, how supremely silly that tired men somewhere away in
the woods the other side of the lines  should be  shoving  a shell into  the
breach of a gun to kill him, Martin Howe!
     Like dice  thrown on a table, shells burst about  the dugout,  now  one
side, now the other.
     "Seem to have taken  a  fancy  to  us  this  evenin'," Howe  heard  Tom
Randolph's voice from the bunk opposite.
     "One," muttered Martin to himself, as he lay frozen  with fear, flat on
his back, biting his trembling lips, "two. . . . God, that was near!"
     A dragging instant of suspense, and the shriek growing  loud out of the
distance.
     "This is us." He clutched the sides of the stretcher.
     A snorting roar rocked the  dugout.  Dirt  fell in his  face. He looked
about, dazed.  The lamp was still  burning. One of  the wounded men,  with a
bandage like an Arab's turban  about his head, sat up  in his stretcher with
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 on
his 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 to himself.




        Chapter VIII


     DUCKS  quacking woke Martin.  For a  moment he could not think where he
was; then he remembered. The rafters of the  loft of  the farmhouse over his
head were hung with bunches of herbs drying. He lay a long while on his back
looking at them, sniffing the sweetened air, while farmyard  sounds occupied
his  ears,  hens cackling,  the  grunting  of  pigs,  the  rou-cou-cou  cou,
rou-cou-coucou of pigeons under the eaves. He stretched himself  and  looked
about  him.  He was alone except  for Tom Randolph, who slept  in a pile  of
blankets  next to  the  wall, his head,  with  its close-cropped black hair,
pillowed on his bare arm. Martin slipped off the canvas cot he  had slept on
and went to the window of the loft, a little square open at the level of the
floor,  through  which came a  dazzle of blue and  gold and green. He looked
out.  Stables  and  hay-barns  filled two  sides of the  farmyard below him.
Behind  them was  a mass  of rustling oak-trees. On  the lichen-greened tile
roofs pigeons strutted  about, putting their coral feet  daintily one before
the other,  puffing  out their glittering breasts. He  breathed deep  of the
smell of hay 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
in blue  gingham, sleeves rolled up as far as possible on her  brown arms, a
girl 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. He
listened carefully for some time. "Wonderful! You can't even hear the guns."

        Chapter IX


     THE  evening  was  pearl-grey  when they left  the  village;  in  their
nostrils was the smell of the leisurely death  of the year, of leaves drying
and falling, of ripened fruit and bursting seed-pods.
     "The fall's a maddening sort o' time for me," said  Tom  Randolph.  "It
makes 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," said
Howe.
     "You do feel as if  Nature had pulled  off her part of the job  and was
restin'."
     They  stopped  a  second  and looked about them, breathing deep. On one
side of the road were woods  where in long  alleys the  mists deepened  into
purple 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, like
muffled drums beaten in nervous haste.
     "Sounds almost like a barrage."
     Martin for  some reason was  thinking  of the last verses  of Shelley's
<i>Hellas</i>. He wished he knew them so that he could recite them.
     <i>"Faiths and empires gleam
     Like wrecks in a dissolving dream."</i>
     The purple  trunks of saplings passed  slowly across the broad face  of
the moon as they walked along. How beautiful the world was!
     "Look,  Tom."  Martin put his arm about  Randolph's shoulder and nodded
towards the  moon. "It  might be  a ship  with  puffed-out  pumpkin-coloured
sails, the way the trees make it look now."
     "Wouldn't it be great to  go  to  sea?" said Randolph, looking straight
into the moon, "an' get out  of  this slaughter-house. It's nice to  see the
war, but I have no intention of taking up butchery as a profession. There is
too much else to do in the world."
     They  walked slowly along  the road talking of the sea, and Martin told
how when he was  a little kid he'd had an  uncle who used to tell  him about
the Vikings and  the Swan Path, and how one of the great moments of his life
had been when he and a friend had looked out of their window in a little inn
on Cape Cod  one morning and seen the  sea and the swaying gold  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." And
they both laughed, a little bitterly.
     They were strolling past a large farmhouse  that stood like a hen among
chicks in a crowd of little outbuildings.  A man in the road lit a cigarette
and Martin recognised him in the orange glare of the match.
     "Monsieur Merrier!" He held out his  hand. It was the  aspirant  he had
drunk 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 the
blues."
     "We'd love to stop in for a second."
     A fire smouldered in the big hearth of the farmhouse kitchen, sending a
little irregular fringe of red light out over the tiled floor. At the end of
the room towards the  door three men were seated  round a table, smoking.  A
candle  threw their huge  and  grotesque  shadows on the  floor  and  on the
whitewashed walls, and lit up the dark beams  of  that part of the  ceiling.
The three men got up and everyone shook hands, filling the room with swaying
giant  shadows. Champagne was brought and tin cups and more candles, and the
Americans were given the two most comfortable chairs.
     "It's such a find to have Americans who  speak French," said  a bearded
man with unusually large brilliant  eyes. He had  been introduced  as  AndrÊ
Dubois, "a  very  terrible  person,"  had  added Merrier, laughing. The cork
popped out of the bottle he had been struggling with.
     "You see, we never can find  out what you think about things. . . . All
we can  do is to be  sympathetically  inane,  and <i>vive les braves alliÊs</i> and
that sort of stuff."
     "I doubt if we Americans do think," said Martin.
     "Cigarettes, who wants some cigarettes?"  cried Lully, a small man with
a very  brown oval face to which  long eyelashes  and a little  bit of silky
black  moustache  gave  almost a  winsomeness.  When he  laughed  he  showed
brilliant, very regular teeth. As he handed the cigarettes  about he  looked
searchingly  at  Martin with eyes disconcertingly intense. "Merrier has told
us about  you," he said.  "You seem to be  the  first American we'd  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 each other,
talking always  among ourselves.  . . . I hope you  won't  be  offended if I
agree with you in saying that Americans never think. I've been in Texas, you
see."
     "Really?"
     "Yes, I went to a Jesuit College  in  Dallas.  I was preparing to enter
the Society of Jesus."
     "How long have you  been in the  war?"  asked AndrÊ Dubois, passing his
hand 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 to
enjoy themselves while the plague was at Florence. That seems to me the only
way to take the war."
     "We have no villa to take refuge in, though," said Dubois, "and we have
forgotten all our amusing stories."
     "And in America--they like the war?"
     "They don't  know  what  it  is.  They are like children. They  believe
everything  they  are  told,  you  see;  they  have  had  no  experience  in
international affairs, like you  Europeans. To  me our entrance into the war
is a tragedy."
     "It's sort of  goin'  back on  our  only excuse  for  existing," put in
Randolph.
     "In exchange for all the quiet and the civilisation and  the  beauty of
ordered lives that Europeans gave up in  going to the new world we gave them
opportunity to earn luxury, and, infinitely more important, freedom from the
past, that gangrened ghost  of the past that  is killing Europe to-day  with
its infection of hate and greed of murder.
     "America  has turned traitor to all that,  you see; that's  the  way we
look at it. Now we're a military nation, an organised pirate like France and
England and Germany."
     "But American idealism? The speeches, the notes?" cried Lully, catching
the 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 through his 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
the Americans' glasses."
     "Thanks."
     "And I used to believe in liberty," said Martin. He raised his  tumbler
and looked  at the candle  through the pale  yellow champagne. On  the  wall
behind him,  his  arm and hand and the tumbler were  shadowed  huge in dusky
lavender 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 to
talk. "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 escape
from to be free; I mean  all  the conventional ties, the worship  of success
and the respect-abilities that is drummed into you when you're young."
     "I suppose everyone has thought that. . . ."
     "How stupid we were before the war, how we prated of small revolts, how
we  sniggered  over little  jokes at religion  and government. And  all  the
while,  in  the infinite greed, in the infinite stupidity of men,  this  was
being prepared." AndrÊ Dubois was speaking, puffing nervously at a cigarette
between phrases, now and then pulling at his beard with a long, sinewy hand.
     "What terrifies me rather is their power to enslave our  minds," Martin
went on, his voice growing louder and  surer  as his idea carried him along.
"I shall  never forget the flags, the menacing, exultant flags along all the
streets  before  we went  to war, the gradual  unbaring  of  teeth,  gradual
lulling to sleep of people's humanity and sense by the phrases, the phrases.
. . . America, as you know, is ruled by the press. And the press is ruled by
whom? Who shall ever know what dark forces bought and bought until we should
be ready to go blinded and gagged to war? . . . People seem to so love to be
fooled. Intellect used to mean freedom, a light struggling against darkness.
Now  the darkness is  using the  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 your
head about  the rest of the  world;  and have  a good time  in spite of  the
God-damned  scoundrels,"  broke out  Randolph in English.  "No use  worrying
yourself into the grave over a thing you can't help."
     "There  is  one  solution and  one  only, my friends,"  said the blonde
Norman; "the Church. . . ." He sat up straight in his chair, speaking slowly
with  expressionless face. "People are too weak and  too kindly to shift for
themselves. Government of some sort there must be. Lay Government has proved
through all the tragic years of history to be merely a ruse of the strong to
oppress the  weak, of the wicked to  fool the confiding.  There remains only
religion. In  the organisation  of  religion  lies  the natural and suitable
arrangement for  the happiness  of  man. The Church will govern  not through
physical force but through spiritual force."
     "The force of fear."  Lully jumped to his feet impatiently,  making the
bottles sway on the table.
     "The  force of love. . . . I  once thought as you do, my friend,"  said
the Norman, pulling Lully back into his chair with a smile.
     Lully  drank a glass of champagne greedily and undid the buttons of his
blue jacket.
     "Go on," he said; "it's madness."
     "All  the  evil of the Church," went on the Norman's even voice, "comes
from her struggles to attain supremacy. Once assured of triumph, established
as the rule of the world,  it  becomes the natural channel through which the
wise rule  and  direct  the  stupid,  not  for  their own interest, not  for
ambition  for  worldly things, but for the love that is in them. The freedom
the  Church offers  is the  only true freedom. It denies the  world, and the
slaveries and  rewards  of it.  It gives the love of God as  the only aim of
life."
     "But think of  the  Church  to-day, the  cardinals at Rome,  the Church
turned everywhere to the worship of tribal gods. . . ."
     "Yes,  but admit that that can be changed. The  Church has been supreme
in  the  past;  can  it not again be supreme?  All  the evil comes from  the
struggle, from the  compromise. Picture  to  yourself  for a moment a  world
conquered by the Church,  ruled through the soul and mind, where force  will
not exist, where instead of  all  the multitudinous tyrannies man has choked
his life with in organising against other  men,  will exist  the one supreme
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?" cried
Lully.
     "But you are  both violent, my children." Merrier  got to  his feet and
smilingly filled the glasses all round. "You go at  the matter too much from
the heroic point of  view. All  this  sermonising does no good. We are  very
simple people  who want to live quietly and have plenty to eat  and  have no
one worry us or hurt us in the little span of sunlight before we die. All we
have now is the same war between  the classes: those  that exploit and those
that  are exploited. The  cunning, unscrupulous  people  control the humane,
kindly people. This war that has  smashed our little European world in which
order was so painfully  taking  the  place  of chaos,  seems to me  merely a
gigantic battle fought over the plunder of the world by the pirates who have
grown fat to  the  point of madness on the work of  their own people, on the
work of the millions in Africa, in India, in America, who have come directly
or indirectly under the yoke of 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 an
anarchist. . . . We are too like sheep; we must go in flocks, and a flock to
live must organise. There is plenty for everyone, even with the huge  growth
in  population all over  the world. What we  want  is  organisation from the
bottom,  organisation  by the  ungreedy, by the  humane,  by  the uncunning,
socialism of the masses that shall spring  from the  natural need  of men to
help one another;  not socialism from the top to the ends  of the governors,
that they may  clamp  us tighter in their fetters. We must 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 must co-operate, they  must learn
that it is saner  and more advantageous to  help one another than  to hinder
one another in the great war  against nature. And the tyranny of the  feudal
money  lords,  the unspeakable misery  of  this war  is  driving men  closer
together into fraternity, co-operation. It  is the lower classes, therefore,
that the new world must be founded  on. The rich must be extinguished;  with
them wars will  die. First  between rich and poor, between the exploiter and
the 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 for
the  lord and another  for the slave, one humanity for  the lord and another
humanity  for  the  slave. What we  must  strive  for  is  a true  universal
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
I  and our  American friends here are not sheep. We are capable  of standing
alone, of judging all for ourselves,  and we  are just ordinary  people like
anyone else."
     "Oh, but look  at us, Lully!" interrupted Merrier. "We are too weak and
too cowardly . . ."
     "An example," said Martin, excitedly leaning across the table. "We none
of us believe that war is right or useful or anything but a  hideous  method
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 an
anarchist,  but I have too much to believe in religion." His tin cup  rapped
sharply on the table as he set it down.
     "No," Lully continued, after a pause, "it is better for man to  worship
God, His image on the clouds, the creation of his fancy, than to worship the
vulgar  apparatus  of  organised  life,  government.  Better  sacrifice  his
children to Moloch than to that  society for the propagation and  protection
of commerce, the nation. Oh, think of the cost of government in all the ages
since  men stopped living  in  marauding tribes!  Think  of  the  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 attaining  peace and comfort--a
bad one,  I think, at that;  not  a thing to be worshipped 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; the inflated greed  of it has spurred
on our nations of the West to throw themselves back, for ever, perhaps, into
the  depths  of  savagery. . . . Oh, if  people would  only  trust their own
fundamental kindliness, the fraternity, the love that is the strongest thing
in life. Abolish property, and the disease of the desire for  it, the desire
to  grasp  and  have, and  you'll  need no government to  protect  you.  The
vividness  and  resiliency of the  life of man is  being  fast crushed under
organisation, tabulation. Overorganisation is death. It is  disorganisation,
not organisation, that is the aim of life."
     "I grant that what all of you say is true, but why say it over and over
again?"  AndrÊ Dubois talked, striding back  and forth beside the table, his
arms gesticulating. His compound shadow  thrown by the candles on  the white
wall followed him back  and forth, mocking him with huge  blurred  gestures.
"The Greek  philosophers  said it  and  the  Indian sages.  Our  descendants
thousands of years from now will say it and wring  their hands as we do. Has
not someone on earth the courage to act?  . . ." The men at the table turned
towards him, watching his tall figure move back and forth.
     "We are  slaves. We are blind. We are deaf. Why should we argue, we who
have  no experience of different  things  to go on?  It has always  been the
same: man the slave of property or religion, of his own shadow. . . First we
must burst our bonds, open our eyes, clear our ears. Now we know nothing but
what we are told by  the rulers.  Oh, the lies, the lies, the lies, the lies
that life is smothered  in! We must  strike  once more for  freedom, for the
sake of  the dignity of man. Hopelessly, cynically, ruthlessly we must  rise
and  show  at  least that we are not  taken in;  that we are  slaves but not
willing  slaves. Oh, they have deceived  us so many times. We have been such
dupes, we have been such dupes!"
     "You are  right,"  said  the blonde Norman sullenly;  "we have all been
dupes."
     A  sudden self-consciousness chilled  them  all to silence for a while.
Without wanting to, they strained  their  ears to hear the  guns. There they
were,  throbbing  loud, unceasing, towards  the  north,  like  hasty muffled
drum-beating.
     <i>"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."</i>
     All  through  the talk snatches from <i>Hellas</i>  had  been  running through
Howe's head.
     After a long pause he turned to  Merrier and asked him how he had fared
in the attack.
     "Oh, not so badly. I brought my skin back," said Merrier, laughing. "It
was a dull  business. After waiting eight hours under gas bombardment we got
orders to  advance, and  so over we  went with  the barrage way ahead of us.
There was no resistance where we  were. We took a lot  of prisoners and blew
up some dugouts and I had the good luck to find a lot  of German  chocolate.
It came in handy, I can tell you, as no ravitaillement came for two days. We
just had biscuits and I  toasted the biscuits and chocolate together and had
quite good meals,  though I  nearly died of thirst afterwards. . . . We lost
heavily, though, when they started counterattacking."
     "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 AndrÊ  Dubois, going to
the corner of the room.
     "That's some souvenir," said Tom Randolph, sitting up suddenly, shaking
himself  out  of the reverie he had been sunk in all through the talk of the
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 until
after 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
glance  the  eager  sunburned  faces,  the  eyes  burning  with  hope,  with
determination, and a sudden joy flared through him.
     "Oh,  there  is hope," he said, drinking down his  glass.  "We  are too
young, too needed to fail. We must find a  way, find the first step of a way
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  had
guttered  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,
twisting his mouth into a faintly bitter smile.
     "Oh, indeed, there must be peace."
     "Of all slaveries, the slavery of war, of armies, is the bitterest, the
most  hopeless slavery."  Lully  was speaking,  his smooth brown  face in  a
grimace of excitement and loathing. "War is our first enemy."
     "But oh,  my friend," said  Merrier, "we will  win in  the end. All the
people in all the armies of the world believe as we do. In all the minds the
seed is sprouting."
     "Before long the day will come. The tocsin will ring."
     "Do you  really believe that?" cried Martin. "Have we the courage, have
we 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 are
merely intellectuals. We cling to a mummified world. But they have the power
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 the
lies. It is the lies that choke us."


     It was very late. Howe and Tom Randolph  were walking home under a cold
white moon already well sunk in the west; northward was  a little flickering
glare above the  tops of the low hills and a sound of firing  as  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
be able to talk."
     "And  they give  you the idea  that something's really going  on in the
world, 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 the
drum-fire in the distance. Martin saw again, as he lay on his side  with his
eyes closed,  the group of men  in blue uniforms, men with eager brown faces
and eyes  gleaming  with  hope, and saw their full red lips  moving  as they
talked.
     The candle threw the shadows of their  heads, huge,  fantastic, and  of
their gesticulating arms on the white walls of the kitchen. And it seemed 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  the
faint candlelight.
     Crouched in the  end of  the dugout  was a man with  a  brown skin like
wrinkled  leather,  and  white eyebrows  and moustaches. All about him  were
piles of  old  boots,  rotten with wear  and mud, holding  fantastically the
imprints of the toes and ankle-bones  of the feet that  had worn  them.  The
candle cast flitting shadows over them so that they seemed to move back  and
forth  faintly,  as do the feet of wounded men laid out on the floor of  the
dressing-station.
     "I'm a cobbler by profession," said the man. He made a gesture with the
blade of his knife in the direction  of a huge bundle of  leather laces that
hung from a beam above his head. "I've done all those since yesterday. 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  he
picked out another boot to be  cut into laces, and started hacking the upper
part off  the worn  sole. "At the little hut, where they  pile up the stiffs
before  they  bury them--you know, just to  the left outside  the abri--they
leave  lots of their boots around. I can pick up  any number I want." With a
clasp-knife he  was cutting the leather in a spiral, paring off a thin lace.
He contracted his bushy eyebrows  as he bent over  his work. The candlelight
glinted on the knife blade as he twisted it about dexterously.
     "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 the
man's leather-blackened palm.
     "Good-bye,"  said  Martin. He walked past men sleeping in  the bunks on
either 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 laces out
of the boots of those who no longer needed them.



        Chapter XI


     THERE  is no sound in  the  poste de  secours. A  faint greenish  light
filters down  from the  quiet  woods  outside. Martin is  kneeling beside  a
stretcher where lies a mass of torn blue uniform crossed  in  several places
by  strips  of white  bandages  clotted with  dark blood.  The massive face,
grimed with mud, is  very waxy and grey. The light hair hangs in clots about
the forehead. The  nose is sharp, but there is a faint smile  about 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 burn feverishly.
     "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
slip back over the crazy burning eyes  and the face takes on again the waxen
look of death.