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UTSIDE the window stretched the village street, flat, with bits of dust rising on the breaths of wind and volleying into rooms, upon the table-cloth and into pages of books. It was a street of small, yellow brick houses, a shapeless church, a convent school, freckled, dingy buildings. Up and down the length of it it was without one touch of beauty. It gave back dust in the eyes; it sounded with thunder of transports, rattle of wagons, soft whir of officers' speed-cars, yelp of motor-horns, and the tap-tap of wooden shoes on tiny peasants, boys and girls. A little sick, black dog slunk down the pavement, smelling and staring. bumped over the cobbles.

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Inside the window, a square room with a litter of sixpenny novels in a corner, fifty or sixty books flung down haphazard, some of them open, with the leaves crushed back by the books above. In another corner lay a heap of commissariat stuff-tins of Bully beef, rabbit, sardines, herring, and glasses of jam and marmalade. On the center-table, a large jug of

marmalade, ants busy in the yellow trickle at the rim. Filth had worked its way into the red table-cover. Filth was on every object in the room, like a soft mist, blurring the color and outlines of things. In the corners, under books and tins, insects moved, long, thin. A hot noon sun came dimly through the dirty glass of the closed window, and slowly baked a sleeping man in the large plush arm-chair. Around the chair, as if it were a promontory in a heaving sea, were billows of stale, crumpled newspapers, some wadded into a ball, others torn across the page, all flung aside in ennui.

The face of the man was weary and weak. It showed all of his forty-one years, and revealed, too, a great emptiness. Flies kept rising and settling again on the hands, the face, and the head of the man -moist flies that felt damp on the skin. They were slow and languid flies, which wanted to settle and stay. It was his breathing that made them restless, but not enough to clear them away; only enough to make a low buzzing in the sultry room.

Across the top of his head a bald streak ran from the forehead, and it was here they returned to alight after each twitching and heave of the sunken body of the sleeping man.

In the early months he had fought a losing fight with them. The walls and ceiling and panes of glass were spotted with the marks of his long battle. But his foes had advanced in ever-fresh force, clouds and swarms of them beyond number. He had gone to meet them with a wire killer and tightly rolled newspapers, he had imported fly-paper from Dunkirk; but they could afford to sacrifice the few hundreds that his strokes could reach, and still overwhelm him. Lately he had given up the struggle, and let them take possession of the room. They harassed him when he read, so he gave up reading. They got into the food, so he ate less. Between his two trips to the front daily, at 8 A.M. and 2 P.M., he slept. He found he could lose himself in sleep. Into that kingdom of sleep they could not enter. As the weeks rolled on, he was able to let himself down more and more easily into silence. That became his life: a slothfulness, a languor, even when awake; a halfconscious forcing of himself through the routine work; a looking forward to the droning room; and then the settling deep into the old plush chair and the blessed unconsciousness.

He drove a Red Cross ambulance twice a day to the French lines at Nieuport, collected the sick and wounded soldiers, and brought them to the Poste de Secours at Coxyde, two miles back of the trenches. It was in Coxyde that he lived, a hundred feet from the poste, always within call. But the emergency call rarely came. There were only the set runs, for the war had settled to its own regularity. A wonderful idleness hung over the lines where millions of men were unemployed, waiting with strange patience for some unseen event. Only the year before, these men were chatting in cafés and busy in a thousand ways. Now the long hours of the day were lived without activity, in thoughtless routine. Under the routine there was al

ways the sense of waiting for a sudden crash and horror.

The man was an English gentleman. It was his own car he had brought, paid for by him, and he had offered it and his services to the Fusiliers Marins. They had been glad of his help, and for twelve months he had performed his daily duty and returned to his loneliness. The men under whom he worked were the French doctors of the poste, the chief, M. ClaudeMarie Le Bot, with four stripes on his arm; the courteous, grave administrator, Eustache-Emmanuel Couillandre, a threestripes man; and half a dozen others, with three stripes and two. They had welcomed him to their group when he came to them from London. They had found him lively and likable, bringing gossip of the West End, with a dash of Leicester Square. Then slowly a change had come on him; he went moody and silent.

"What's the matter with you?" asked Dr. Le Bot one day.

"Nothing's the matter with me," answered the man. "It 's war that 's the matter."

"What do you mean by that?" put in one of the younger doctors.

"The trouble with war," began the man, slowly, "is n't that there's danger and death. They are easy. The trouble with war is this: it 's dull-damned, deadly dull. It's the slowest thing in the world. It wears away at your mind, like water dripping on a rock. The old torture of letting water fall on your skull, drop by drop, till you went raving crazy is nothing to what war does to the mind of millions of men. They can't think of anything else but war, and they have no thoughts about that. They can't talk of another blessed thing, and the result is they have nothing to say at all."

As he talked, a flush came into his face. He gathered speed till his words came with a rush, as if he were relieving himself of inner pain.

"Have you ever heard the true inside account of an arctic expedition?" he went on. "There's a handful of men locked up inside a little ship for thirteen or fourteen

months. Nothing to look out on but snow and ice, one color, and a horizonful of it. Nothing to dream of but arriving at a pole, and that is a theoretical point in infinite space. There's no such thing. The midnight sun and the frozen stuff get on their nerves; same old sun in the same old place, same kind of weather. What happens? The natural thing, of course. They get so they hate one another like poison. They go around with a mad on. They carry hate against the

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commander and the cook and the fellow whose berth creaks every time he shifts. Each man thinks the shipload is the rottenest gang ever thrown together. wonders why they did n't bring somebody decent along. He gets to scoring up grudges against the different people, and waits his chance to get back."

He stopped a minute, and looked around at the doctors, who were giving him close attention. Then he went on with the same intensity:

"Now, that 's war, only war is more so. Here you are in one place for sixteen months. You shovel yourself into a stinking hole in the ground. At seven in the morning you boil yourself some muddy coffee that tastes like the River Thames at Battersea Bridge. You take a knife that 's had welts hacked out of it and cut a hunk of dry bread that chews like sand. You eat some Bully beef out of a tin, the same tinned stuff that you 've been eating ever since your stomach went on strike a year ago. Once a week, for a treat, you cut a steak off the flank of a dead horse. That tastes better, because it 's fresh meat. When you 're sent back a few miles en piquet, you sleep in a village that looks like Sodom after the sulphur struck it: houses singed and tumbled, dead bodies in the ruins, a broken-legged dog trailing its hind foot in front of the house where you are. Tobacco, surely. You'd die if you did n't have a smoke. But the rotten little cigarettes with no taste to them that smoke like chopped hay! And the cigars made out of rags and shredded toothpicks-"

"Here, have a cigarette," suggested the youngest doctor.

But the man was too busy in working out his own thoughts.

"The whole thing," he continued, "is a mixture of a morgue and a hospital, only those places have running water, and people in white aprons to tidy things up. And a battle! Three days under bombardment, living in the cellar, the guns going off five, six times to the minute, and then waiting a couple of hours and dropping one in next door. The crumpling noise when a little brick house caves in like a man when you hit him in the stomachjust going all together in a heap. And the sick smell that comes out of the mess from plaster and brick dust.

"And getting wounded, that 's jolly, is n't it? Rifle-ball through your left biceps. Dick walks you back to the dressing-station. Doctor busy at luncheon with a couple of visiting officers. Lie down in the straw. Straw has a pleasant smell when it's smeared with iodine and blood. Wait till the doctor has had his bottle of wine.

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"Nothing very much,' he says when he gets around to you. Drops some juice in, ties the white rag around, and you go back to your straw. Three, four hours, and along come the body-snatchers. chauffeur chap does n't know how to drive; bumps into every shell-hole for seven miles. Every half-mile drives out into the ditch mud to get out of the way of some ammunition-wagons going to the front. The wheel gets stuck. Puts on power in jumps to bump the car out. Every jerk tears at your open sore as if the wheel had got stuck in your arm and was being pulled out. Two hours to do the seven miles. You get to the field-hospital. No time for you. Lie on your stretcher in the court, where the flies swarm on you. Always flies-flies on the blood of the wounded, glued to the bandage; flies on the eyelids of the dead."

So he had once spoken, and left them wondering. But that whirling burst of words was long before, in those earlier days of his work. Nothing like that had happened in weeks. No such vivid pictures lighted him now. The man slept on.