until it ceased. For the guns themselves had worn out. And when infantry tactics came to take the place of the warfare of fortresses and tanks, those few guns which remained had, one by one, been abandoned, perforce, and left in ruins to a rapidly advancing enemy. This was particularly true of the smaller field guns which had hung on feebly to the last.

It had been four years since he had received his last orders by radio, for there were no longer parts for replacement. And though it was rumored that G.H.Q. of the B.E.F. had radio communication with England no one could really tell. It had been seven years since a new uniform had been issued, three years or more since a rank had been made for an officer.

His world was a shambles of broken townships and defiled fields, an immense cemetery where thirty million soldiers and three hundred million civilians had been wrenched loose from life. And though the death which had shrieked out of the skies would howl no more, there was no need. Its work was done.

Food supplies had diminished to a vanishing point when a power, rumored to have been Russia, had spread plant insects over Europe. Starvation had done its best to surpass the death lists of battle. And, as an ally, another thing had come.

The disease known as soldier's sickness had wiped a clammy hand across the slate of Europe, taking ten times as many as the fighting of the war itself. Death crept silently over the wastes of grass-grown shell holes and gutted cities, slipping bony fingers into the cogs of what organization had survived. From the Mediterranean to the Baltic, no wheel turned for the illness was not one disease germ grossly mutated into a killer which defied penicillin, sulfa, pantomecin, and stereo-rays, it was at least nine illnesses, each one superior to yellow fever or the bubonic plague. The nine had combined amongst themselves to create an infinite variety of manifestations. In far countries, South America, South Africa, Scandinavia, where smoke might have belched from busy chimneys, nearly annihilated nations which had never been combatants had closed their ports and turned to wooden sticks for plows. Their libraries might still bulge with know-how but who could go there to read them? Nations entirely innocent of any single belligerent move in this war, or these many wars, had become, capitals and hamlets alike, weed grown and tumbled ruins to be quarantined a half century or more from even their own people.

But the lieutenant was not unhappy about it. He had no comparisons. When lack of credit and metal and workmen had decreed the 

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