"That's his. Will you give it to them at [41]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."

[41]

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, good-natured lips puffed into an o-shape. At the car he turned and saluted.

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

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

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

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

The guards got in behind him with a nervous, sheepish air. They 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 [42]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 wood-scents, 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 

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