me, the fruitful village and the well-loved land--there is
no acre remaining where his thought can rest. Each
remembered place brings a sharper stroke of poignancy to the
mind that is dispossessed.

His is a mental life uprooted and flung out into a vast
loneliness. Where can his thought turn when it would heal
itself? To the disconsolate there has always been comfort
in recalling the early home where childhood was nourished,
the orchard and the meadow where first love came to the
meeting, the eager city where ambition, full-panoplied,
sprang from the brain. The mind is hung with pictures of
what once was. But there must always be a local habitation
for these rekindled heats. Somewhere, in scene and setting,
the boy played, the youth loved, the man struggled. That
richness of feeling is interwoven with a place. No passion
or gladness comes out of the buried years without some bit
of the soil clinging to it.

Now, in a passing autumn, for a nation of people, all places
are alike to them bitter in the recollection. The Belgian,
disinherited, can never summon a presence out of the past
which will not, in its coming, bring burning and slaughter.
All that was fair in his consciousness has been seared with
horror. Where can he go to be at home? To England? To a new
continent? What stranger-city will give him back his
memories? He is condemned forever to live in the moment,
never to let his mind stray over the past. For, in the past,
in gracious prospect, lie village and city of Flanders, and
the name of the ravaged place will suddenly release a cloud
of darkness with voices of pain.

III

ROLLO, THE APOLLO

Mrs. Bracher was just starting on one of her excursions from Pervyse
into Furnes. Her tiny first-aid hospital, hidden in the battered house,
needed food, clothing, and dressings for the wounded. One morning when
the three nurses were up in the trenches, a shell had dug down into
their cellar and spilled ruin. Now, it is not well to live in a place
which a gun has located, because modern artillery is fine in its
workings to a hair's-breadth, and can repeat its performance to a
fractional inch. So the little household had removed themselves from the
famous cellar to a half-shattered house, which had one whole living-room
on the ground floor, good for wounded and for the serving of meals; and
one un