nd Randolph,  after  lengthy  and
elaborate farewells, started  down the muddy road towards the hospital. They
staggered  along  the  slippery  footpath beside  the  road,  splashed every
instant with mud by camions, huge and  dark, that roared grindingly by. They
ran and skipped arm-in-arm and shouted at the top of their lungs:
     <i>"Aupr¨s de ma blonde,
     Qu'il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon,
     Aupr¨s de ma blonde,
     Qu'il fait bon dormir."</i>
     A stench of sweat and filth  and formaldehyde caught them by the throat
as they went into the hospital tent, gave them a sense of feverish bodies of
men stretched all about them, stirring in pain.


     "A car for  la Bassİe, Ambulance 4," said the orderly. Howe got himself
up  off  the  hospital stretcher, shoving his  flannel shirt  back  into his
breeches, put on  his coat and belt and felt his way to  the door, stumbling
over the legs of sleeping brancardiers as  he went. Men swore in their sleep
and turned over heavily. At the door he waited 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  reeking
clothes, the night air was unbelievably sweet. Like a  gilt fringe on a dark
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. At
the 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 a
door. "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. He
smiled reassuringly  at Martin Howe.  "He's not violent any more.  And we'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? And
here's his knife. They can  give it  back to him when he gets better. He has
an idea he ought to kill everyone he sees. . . . Funny idea."
     The sun  had risen and shone gold  across the  broad  rolling lands, so
that the 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 glances to
the right and to the left, came placidly, eyes straight in front of him, out
of  the  dark interior  of  the dressing-station. He  was  a small  man with
moustaches and small, goodnatured 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
answered reassuringly, "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, kill
everybody."


     In an open valley that  sloped between hills covered  with beech-woods,
stood  the tall abbey,  a  Gothic nave  and  apse  with  beautifully  traced
windows, with the ruin  of a very ancient  chapel on one side, and  crossing
the  back,   a  well-proportioned  Renaissance  building  that  had  been  a
dormitory. The first time that  Martin saw  the abbey, it towered in ghostly
perfection above a low veil of mist  that made the valley seem a lake in the
shining  moonlight. The lines were perfectly  quiet, and when he stopped the
motor  of  his  ambulance,  he  could  hear  the  wind  rustling  among  the
beech-woods. Except for the  dirty smell of huddled  soldiers  that came now
and  then in drifts along with the cool woodscents, there might have been no
war  at  all. In the  soft  moonlight the  great traceried  windows and  the
buttresses  and the  high-pitched  roof  seemed as  gorgeously untroubled by
decay as if the  carvings on the cusps  and arches had just  come from under
the careful chisels of the Gothic workmen.
     "And you say we ye progressed," he whispered to Tom Randolph.
     "God, it is fine."
     They wandered  up  and  down the road a long time, silently, looking at
the  tall apse of the abbey, breathing the cool night air, moist with  mist,
in which now and then was the huddled, troubling  smell of soldiers. At last
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 blankets  and went to
sleep.
     Behind the square lantern that rose over the crossing, there was a trap
door in the broken  tile roof, from which you could climb to the observation
post in the lantern.  Here, half on the roof and half on the platform behind
the trap door, Martin would  spend the long summer afternoons when there was
no call  for the ambulance, looking at the Gothic windows of the lantern and
the  blue sky beyond, where huge soft  clouds passed slowly  over, darkening
the green of the woods and of the weed-grown fields of the valley with their
moving shadows.
     There  was almost no  activity on that part of  the front. A  couple of
times a day a few snapping discharges would come from  the seventy-fives  of
the battery behind the abbey, and the woods would resound like a shaken harp
as  the shells  passed over to explode on the crest of the hill that blocked
the end of the valley where the Boches were.
     Martin  would  sit  and dream of the  quiet  lives the  monks must have
passed  in  their beautiful abbey so far away in the Forest of  the Argonne,
digging and planting in the rich  lands of  the valley, making flowers bloom
in the  garden, of which traces remained in the huge beds of  sunflowers and
orange marigolds that bloomed along the walls of the Dormitory. In a room in
the top  of the  house he had found a few torn remnants of books; there must
have been a library in the old days, rows and rows of musty-smelling volumes
in rich brown calf worn  by use to a velvet softness,  and in cream-coloured
parchment where the fingermarks of  generations showed brown; huge  psalters
with  notes  and  chants illuminated  in  green and  ultramarine  and  gold;
manuscripts out of the  Middle Ages with strange script and pictures in pure
vivid  colours;  lives  of  saints, thoughts  polished  by  years  of  quiet
meditation of old divines;  old  romances  of chivalry;  tales  of blood and
death and love where  the crude agony of  life was seen  through a dawn-like
mist of gentle beauty.
     "God! if  there were somewhere  nowadays  where you could flee from all
this  stupidity, from  all  this  cant  of  governments,  and  this  hideous
reiteration  of hatred,  this  strangling  hatred  . .  ." he would  say  to
himself, and see himself working in the fields, copying parchments in quaint
letterings, drowsing his  feverish  desires  to  calm  in  the deep-throated
passionate chanting of the endless offices of the Church.
     One afternoon towards  evening  as  he lay on the  tiled roof with  his
shirt open  so that the sun warmed his throat and chest, half  asleep in the
beauty  of  the  building  and  of  the woods  and the  clouds that  drifted
overhead,  he heard  a strain from the organ in the church: a few deep notes
in  broken rhythm that  filled  him with wonder, as if he had  suddenly been
transported back to  the  quiet days of the monks.  The rhythm changed in an
instant, and  through the  squeakiness of shattered pipes  came a  swirl  of
fake-oriental ragtime that resounded like mocking laughter in the old vaults
and arches. He went down into the church and  found Tom Randolph  playing on
the little organ, pumping desperately with his feet.
     "Hello!  Impiety I call it; putting your lustful  tunes into that pious
old 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 into
one."
     "But there are. I'll  end up in one, most like, if they don't put me in
jail first. I reckon  every living soul would be a candidate for either  one
if it'd get them out of this God-damned war."
     There was a shriek  overhead that reverberated strangely in the  vaults
of the church and made the swallows nesting there fly in and out through the
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,
where he  had thrown himself automatically. A shower  of tiles came rattling
off the roof, and  through the noise could be heard the frightened squeaking
of 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  blood
stronger than  the chloride. A doctor was leaning over a  stretcher on which
Martin caught a  glimpse of two naked legs with flecks of blood on the white
skin, as he passed through on his way to the car.
     "Three  stretcher-cases  for  Les  Islettes.  Very  softly,"  said  the
attendant, handing him the papers.
     Jolting over  the  shell-pitted  road, the  car  wound  slowly  through
unploughed weed-grown fields.  At  every jolt came a rasping groan  from the
wounded men.
     As  they  came  back towards the front posts again, they  found all the
batteries along the  road firing. The air  was a chaos  of  explosions  that
jabbed  viciously into their ears, above the reassuring purr  of the  motor.
Nearly to the abbey a soldier stopped them.
     "Put the car  behind the trees and get into a dugout. They're  shelling
the abbey."
     As he spoke a whining shriek grew suddenly  loud over  their heads. The
soldier threw himself flat in the  muddy road.  The explosion brought gravel
about their ears and made a curious smell of almonds.
     Crowded in the door of the dugout in the hill opposite they watched the
abbey  as shell after shell tore through the roof or exploded  in the strong
buttresses  of the apse.  Dust  rose high above the roof and  filled the air
with an odour of  damp  tiles and plaster. The woods resounded in a jangling
tremor, with the batteries that started firing one after the other.
     "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 their
heads.
     "It's  not  safe  there.  You'd better come in all  the  way,"  someone
shouted from within the dugout.
     "I want to see;  damn it. . . . I'm goin' to stay and see it out, Howe.
That place 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 the
scream. When  the cloud  of  dust blew away, they saw that  the  lantern had
fallen in on the roof of the apse, leaving only one wall and the tracery  of
a window, of  which the  shattered carving stood out cream-white against the
reddish evening sky.
     There was a lull in the firing. A few swallows still  wheeled about the
walls, giving shrill little cries.
     They  saw  the flash of a shell against  the sky as it exploded  in the
part of the tall roof that still  remained.  The roof  crumpled and fell in,
and again dust hid the abbey.
     "Oh, I  hate  this!"  said Tom Randolph.  "But the question  is, what's
happened to our grub? The popote is buried four feet deep in Gothic art. . .
. Damn fool idea, putting a dressing-station over an ammunition dump."
     "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 that
blows from one side to the other in the gusty wind that puffs  every now and
then down  the mouth of the dugout  and whirls round it like something alive
trying to beat a way out.
     Each time the lamp blows  the shadows of the five heads writhe upon the
corrugated  tin ceiling.  In  the distance, like  kettle-drums beaten for  a
dance, a constant reverberation of guns.
     Martin Howe,  stretched out in  the straw  of one of the bunks, watches
their faces in the flickering shadows. He wishes he had the patience to play
too. No, perhaps it is better to look on;  it would be so silly to be killed
in the middle  of one of those grand gestures one makes in slamming the card
down that takes the trick. Suddenly he thinks of all the lives that must, in
these last three  years, have ended in that grand gesture.  It is too silly.
He seems to  see their poor lacerated souls, clutching their greasy dogeared
cards,  climb  to  a  squalid  Valhalla,  and  there,  in  tobacco-stinking,
sweat-stinking rooms, like  those of the little cafİs behind the  lines, sit
in groups of five, shuffling, dealing, taking  tricks, always with the  same
slam  of  the  cards on  the  table,  pausing now and then to  scratch their
louse-eaten flesh.
     At this  moment,  how many men, in all the long Golgotha that stretches
from  Belfort  to the sea, must be trying  to  cheat their boredom and their
misery  with that grand gesture  of slamming the cards down to take a trick,
while in their ears, like tom-toms, pounds the death-dance of the guns.
     Martin  lies on his back looking up at the curved corrugated ceiling of
the dugout, where the shadows of the five heads writhe in  fantastic shapes.
Is it death they are playing, that they are so merry when they take a trick?




        Chapter V


     THE  three planes  gleamed like mica in the  intense blue  of  the sky.
Round about  the  shrapnel burst in little  puffs like cotton-wool.  A shout
went  up  from the soldiers who stood in groups in the street of the  ruined
town. A whistle split the air, followed by  a rending snort  that tailed off
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  if
they beaded you on the way back you wouldn't care."
     In the  sky an escadrille of French planes  had appeared  and the three
German specks had vanished, followed by a trail of little puffs of shrapnel.
The  indigo  dome of  the  afternoon sky  was  full of a  distant snoring of
motors.
     The train screamed outside the  station and the permissionaires ran for
the platform, their packed musettes bouncing at their hips.
     The  dark  boulevards, with here and  there  a blue lamp lighting up  a
bench and a few tree-trunks, or a faint glow from inside  a closed caf where
a boy in shirt-sleeves is sweeping the floor. Crowds  of soldiers, Belgians,
Americans, Canadians, civilians with  canes and  straw hats and well-dressed
women on their arms,  shop-girls in twos and threes  laughing  with  shrill,
merry  voices; and everywhere  girls  of  the street, giggling alluringly in
hoarse,  dissipated tones, clutching the arms  of  drunken soldiers, tilting
themselves temptingly in men's way as they walk along. Cigarettes and cigars
make spots of reddish light, and now and then a match lighted makes  a man's
face stand out in yellow  relief and glints red in  the eyes of people round
about.
     Drunk with their freedom, with the jangle of voices, with the rustle of
trees  in  the  faint  light,  with the  scents  of women's  hair  and cheap
perfumes,  Howe and  Randolph  stroll along  slowly,  down one side  to  the
shadowy  columns  of the  Madeleine,  where a few  flower-women still  offer
roses,  scenting the darkness, then back  again  past  the  Opra towards the
Porte St. Martin, lingering to look in the offered faces of women, to listen
to snatches of talk, to chatter laughingly with girls who squeeze their arms
with impatience.
     "I'm goin' to find the prettiest girl in Paris, and then you'll see the
dust fly, Howe, old man."


     The hors d'oeuvres came on a circular three-tiered stand; red strips of
herrings and silver anchovies, salads where  green peas and  bits of  carrot
lurked  under  golden  layers   of  sauce,  sliced  tomatoes,  potato  salad
green-specked with parsley, hard-boiled  eggs barely visible under thickness
of vermilion-tinged  dressing, olives, radishes,  discs  of  sausage of many
different  forms and colours, complicated bundles  of spiced salt fish, and,
forming the  apex, a fat terra-cotta jar of p˘tİ de  foie gras. Howe  poured
out pale-coloured Chablis.
     "I used  to  think that down home was the  only  place they knew how to
live, but oh, boy . . ." said Tom Randolph, breaking a little  loaf of bread
that made a merry crackling sound.
     "It's worth starving to death on singe and pinard for four months."
     After   the   hors   d'oeuvres   had  been  taken  away,  leaving  them
Rabelaisianly gay,  with a  joyous sense  of orgy, came  sole  hidden  in  a
cream-coloured sauce with mussels in it.
     "After  the war, Howe, ole man, let's riot all over Europe; I'm getting
a taste for this sort of livin'."
     "You can play the fiddle, can't you, Tom?"
     "Enough to scrape out <i>Aupr¨s de ma blonde</i> on a bet."
     "Then we'll wander about and you can support me. Or  else I'll dress as
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 M˘con."
     "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  its
piles  of ravished  artichoke  leaves was  the centre of a  noisy, fantastic
world. Ever since the orgy of the hors d'ueuvres things had been evolving to
grotesqueness, faces, whites of eyes, twisted red  of lips, crow-like  forms
of waiters, colours of  hats  and uniforms, all involved  and jumbled in the
melİe of talk and clink and clatter.
     The red hand of the waiter pouring the Chartreuse,  green like a stormy
sunset, into small glasses before them broke into the vivid  imaginings that
had been  unfolding  in their talk through dinner. No, they had been saying,
it  could not go on; some day amid the rending crash of shells and the whine
of  shrapnel fragments, people  everywhere,  in  all uniforms,  in trenches,
packed  in  camions,  in  stretchers,  in  hospitals,  crowded behind  guns,
involved in  telephone apparatus, generals at their  dinner-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 would untune the sky.  It would
be a  new progress  of Bacchus. Drunk with  laughter at the sudden vision of
the silliness of the world, officers and soldiers,  prisoners working on the
roads,  deserters  being driven towards the trenches would  throw down their
guns and their spades and their  heavy packs, and start marching, or driving
in artillery waggons  or in camions,  staff  cars,  private  trains, towards
their  capitals,  where  they  would  laugh the deputies,  the senators, the
congressmen, the M.P.'s out of their  chairs,  laugh the presidents  and the
prime  ministers, and kaisers  and dictators  out  of  their  plush-carpeted
offices; the sun would wear a broad grin and would whisper the  joke to  the
moon, who would giggle and ripple with it all night long. . . . The red hand
of the waiter, with thick nails and work-swollen knuckles, poured Chartreuse
into the small glasses before them.
     "That,"  said Tom Randolph,  when he had half finished his liqueur, "is
the 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."  Tom
Randolph was out of  the door. The girl, who had a little of the aspect of a
pierrot, with dark  skin and bright  lips and gold-yellow hat and dress, and
the sour-looking officer who was with her, were getting up to go.
     At the corner of the boulevard Howe heard a woman's voice  joining with
Randolph'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 too
late, we must have a drink."
     At the  cafİ table next  to them an Englishman was seated with his head
sunk on 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 his
eyes 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 a man tuck a hand-grenade  under the pillow of a poor devil of  a German
prisoner. 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 heads
close 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 at
last 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 the
air.
     The little round man with a round red  face who  was taking the tickets
stuttered in bad English  and then dropped into French. Meanwhile, the whole
party had  filed in, leaving the  Englishman, who kept waving the  ticket in
the little man's face.
     Two gendarmes, the theatre guards, came up menacingly; the Englishman's
face wreathed  itself in smiles; he linked an arm in each of the gendarmes',
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 the
chest of one and then the other alternately, laughing so that  you could see
the gold caps in her black teeth.
     They  were annoyed at the  intrusion that packed the box  insupportably
tight,  so that the woman had  to  sit on the men's laps, but  the  air soon
cleared in laughter that caused people in the orchestra  to stare angrily at
the box full of noisy men in khaki. At  last  the Englishman came, squeezing
himself in with a finger  mysteriously on his lips. He plucked  at  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  round  Martin's
head--"the Hun was a nice little chap, couldn't 'a' been more than eighteen;
had  a shoulder broken and  he thought that my pal was fixing 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 the grenade blew him to hell."
     The stage was a glare of light in Martin's eyes; he felt as he had when
at home he had leaned over and looked straight into the headlight of an auto
drawn up  to  the side of  the road.  Screening him from the glare were  the
backs  of people's heads:  Tom Randolph's head and his girl's, side by side,
their  cheeks touching, the pointed red  chin  of one of the Australians and
the frizzy hair of the other woman.
     In the entr'acte they all stood  at the bar, where it was very hot  and
an orchestra was playing and there were many  men in  khaki in all stages of
drunkenness, being led about by women who threw jokes  at  each other behind
the men's backs.
     "Here's  to mud,"  said one of  the Australians. "The  war'll end  when
everybody is drowned in mud."
     The orchestra began playing the  <i>Madelon</i>  and everyone roared  out  the
marching  song that, worn threadbare as it was, still had a roistering verve
to it that caught people's blood.
     People  had  gone  back for  the last  act. The  two  Australians,  the
Englishman, and the two Americans still stood talking.
     "Mind you, I'm not what you'd call  susceptible.  I'm  not soft.  I got
over  all  that long  ago."  The  Englishman was addressing  the company  in
general. "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 answered
mechanically.
     Somehow,  during  the entr'acte,  the Australians had collected another
woman; and a strange fat woman with lips painted very small, and very  large
bulging  eyes, had attached herself to Martin. He suffered her because every
time he looked at her she burst out laughing.
     The bar was closing. They had  a drink of champagne all round that made
the fat woman give little shrieks of delight. They drifted towards the door,
and stood,  a formless, irresolute group, in the dark street in front 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 <i>Cafİ de la Paix.</i>"
     "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 a
kiss in the darkness.
     "I  say, I've  got to  have something  to eat," said the Englishman. "I
didn't have a bit of dinner.  I  say-- mangai, mangai." He  made gestures of
putting things into his mouth in the direction of the fat woman.
     The three women put their heads together. One of them knew a place, but
it was a dreadful place.  Really, they mustn't  think that. .  . .  She only
knew it because when she was very young a man had taken her there who wanted
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,
and an  immovable face  with jaw muscled like a prize-fighter's, served them
with  cold chicken and ham and  champagne in a room with mouldering greenish
wall-paper lighted by a red-shaded lamp.
     The  Australians  ate  and  sang  and  made  love  to  their women. The
Englishman went to sleep with his head on the table.
     Martin  leaned back out of the  circle of light, keeping up a desultory
conversation with the woman beside him, listening to the sounds of the men's
voices down corridors, of the front door being opened and  slammed again and
again, and of forced, shrill giggles of women.
     "Unfortunately,  I have  an  engagement to-night," said  Martin  to the
woman beside him, whose  large spherical breasts  heaved  as she talked, and
who rolled herself nearer to him invitingly, seeming with her round pop-eyes
and her round  cheeks to be made up entirely of small spheres and large soft
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  sympathetic
admiration.
     "This will be the fourth night this week that I have not made a sou . .
. . I'll chuck myself into the river soon."
     Martin  felt himself softening  towards her. He  slipped a twenty-franc
note 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
like to love to-night. She should be very dark, with  red  lips  and stained
cheeks, like  Randolph's  girl; she should have  small breasts and  slender,
dark,  dancer's thighs,  and in her arms he could forget everything  but the
madness and the  mystery and  the intricate  life of  Paris  about  them. He
thought  of Montmartre, and  Louise  in  the  opera  standing  at her window
singing the madness of Paris. . . .
     One  of the  Australians had gone away with a  little woman  in  a pink
negligİe. The other  Australian  and the Englishman were standing unsteadily
near  the table,  each  supported by a sleepy-looking girl. Leaving the  fat
woman sadly finishing the  remains of the chicken,  large tears rolling from
her eyes, they left the house and walked for a long  time down dark streets,
three  men  and two  women,  the Englishman  being  supported 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. The pavement
was  wet, and glimmered  where it  slanted  up to the lamp-post at the  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 on
the pavement  facing  each other. The Englishman  collapsed on the doorstep,
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  a
profession----" said Martin softly.
     "No, dearie. I must go," said Martin.
     "As you will. I'll take care of your friend." She yawned.
     He kissed her and stumbled down  the dark stairs, his  nostrils full of
the smell of the rouge on her lips.
     He  walked a long while with  his hat off,  breathing deep of the sharp
night air.  The streets  were black and silent. Intemperate  desires prowled
about him 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 the
square towers  of Notre Dame and the row of kings across  the fa§ade and the
sculpture about the darkness of  the doorways.  He had lain down on his back
on the  little grass plot of the Parvis Notre Dame to look at the 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 the grenade
blew him to hell." He  remembered the  man he had once  helped to pick up in
whose pocket a  grenade had exploded. Before that he  had not  realized 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 across
the low rail on to the pavement.
     "Ah, yes; it is beautiful."
     Martin Howe sat on the rail of the bridge and  looked. Before him, with
nothing  distinct  yet to be seen,  were  two square  towers and the tracery
between  them and  the row of kings on  the fa§ade, and the  long  series of
flying  buttresses  of  the  flank, gleaming  through  the mist, and, barely
visible,  the  dark, slender  spire  soaring above the  crossing. So had the
abbey  in  the forest  gleamed  tall in the misty moonlight; like mist, only
drab and dense, the dust had risen above the tall apse as the shells tore it
to pieces.


     Amid a smell of new-roasted coffee he sat at a table and watched people
pass  briskly  through  the ruddy sunlight. Waiters  in  shirt-sleeves  were
rubbing  off  the other tables and putting out  the chairs. He  sat  sipping
coffee, feeling languid  and nerveless. After a  while Tom Randolph, looking
very  young and  brown with his hat  a  little on one side, came along. With
him,  plainly dressed  in blue serge, was the  girl. They  sat  down and she
dropped her head on his shoulder, covering her eyes with her 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 of
bread.
     "Oh, Paris is wonderful in the early morning!" said Martin.
     "Indeed it is. .  . . Good-bye, little girl, if you must  go. We'll see
each other 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  a
little while  on the grass in  front of Notre Dame. That was my real love of
the night."
     "My girl was charming. . . . Honestly, I'd marry  her in a  minute." He
laughed 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 cast
rusty  patches on the grey houses and on the thronged fantastic chimney-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 the
white wall opposite. The patch of  light is constantly crossed and scalloped
and obscured by shadows of rifles and helmets and packs of men  passing. Now
and then the shadow of a  single man, a  nose  and a chin under  a helmet, a
head bent forward with the weight of the pack, or a  pack alone beside which
slants a rifle, shows up huge and fantastic  with its  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 of
artillery  comes up out of  the darkness  of the road, is thrown by the lamp
into  vivid  relief  and  is swallowed again by the blackness of the village
street,  short  bodies  of  seventy-fives  sticking  like ducks' tails  from
between their  large wheels;  caisson  after  caisson  of  ammunition,  huge
waggons  hooded and unhooded, filled with a chaos of equipment  that catches
fantastic lights and throws huge muddled shadows on the white  wall  of  the
house.
     "Put that light out.  Name  of  God, do you  want  to have  them  start
chucking shells into here?" comes a voice  shrill with anger. The brisk trot
of the officer's horse is lost in the clangour.
     The  door of  the  hut slams to and  only a  thin  ray of  orange light
penetrates into the blackness of the road, where with jingle of  harness and
clatter of  iron and  tramp of hoofs, gun after gun, caisson  after caisson,
waggon  after waggon  files by.  Now and then the passing stops entirely and
matches flare where men  light pipes and cigarettes.  Coming  from the other
direction with throbbing of motors, a convoy of camions, huge black oblongs,
grinds down the other side of the road. Horses rear and there are shouts and
curses and clacking of reins in the darkness.
     Far away where the lowering clouds meet the  hills beyond the village a
white 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; three
more 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 the
Four de Paris."
     "Damned unlikely."
     "Anyway, this is the third week we've been in this bloody hold with our
feet in the mud."
     "They've got us  quartered in  a  barn  with  a  regular brook  flowing
through the 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.
The rain fell in perpendicular sheets, pattering on the roof of the  car and
on  the  puddles  that  filled  the village street.  Streaming  with  water,
blackened walls of ruined  houses  rose opposite them above a rank growth of
weeds. Beyond were rain-veiled hills. Every little while, slithering through
the  rain, splashing mud to the right and left, a convoy  of camions went by
and disappeared, truck after truck, in the white streaming rain.
     Inside the car Tom Randolph was playing  an accordion, letting  strange
nostalgic little songs filter out amid the hard patter of the rain.
     <i>"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."</i>
     The  men on  the front seat leaned back and  shook the water  off their
knees and hummed the song.
     The accordion had stopped. Tom Randolph was lying  on his  back  on the
floor  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-coloured
puddles of  the  road.  Their  boredom  fell  into the  rhythm  of  crooning
self-pity of the old coon song:
     <i>"I's been workin' on de railroad
     All de livelong day;
     I's been workin' on de railroad
     Jus' to pass de time away."</i>
     "Oh, God, something's got to happen soon."
     Lost in rubber boots, and a huge gleaming slicker and hood, the section
leader 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 six
to-night. . . ."
     "I tell you, fellers, there's goin' to be an attack. This concentration
of sanitary sections means something. You can't tell me . . ."
     "They say they have beer," said the aspirant behind Martin  in the long
line of men who waited in the hot sun for  the copİ to open,  while the dust
the staff cars and  camions raised as they whirred by on the road settled in
a blanket over the village.
     "Cold beer?"
     "Of course not," said the aspirant, laughing so that  all the brilliant
ivory teeth showed behind his red lips. "It'll be detestable. I'm getting it
because it's rare, for sentimental reasons."
     Martin  laughed, looking in the man's brown  face,  a face in which all
past expressions seemed to linger in the fine lines about the mouth and eyes
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  well-head in the courtyard
behind the store, drinking warm  beer out of tin cups blackened by wine, and
staring 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
in your little omnibus."
     "I hope you won't."
     "I'd be very glad to.  A lucky wound! But I'll probably be killed. This
is the first  time  I've  gone up  to the front that I  didn't expect to  be
killed. So it'll probably happen."
     Martin Howe could not help looking at him suddenly. The aspirant sat at
ease on  the  stone  margin of the  well, leaning  against the  wrought iron
support for  the  bucket,  one  knee clasped in  his strong,  heavily veined
hands.  Dead he  would  be different. Martin's mind  could hardly  grasp the
connection  between this man fu