eir country on their backs, walk the wide world in a cloud of their
own atmosphere, making that world England. The French have eyes to see,
and, when not surrounded by houses that have flatness, shutters, and
subtle colouring--yellowish, French-grey, French-green--by cafe's, by
plane-trees, by Frenchwomen, by scents of wood-smoke and coffee roasted
in the streets; by the wines, and infusions of the herbs of France; by
the churches of France and the beautiful silly chiming of their
bells--when not surrounded by all these, they know it, feel it, suffer.
But even they do not suffer so dumbly and instinctively, so like a wild
animal caged, as that Breton fisherman, caged up in a world of hill and
valley--not the world as he had known it. They called his case
'shell-shock'--for the French system would not send a man to
convalescence for anything so essentially civilian as home-sickness,
even when it had taken a claustrophobic turn. A system recognises only
causes which you can see; holes in the head, hamstrung legs, frostbitten
feet, with other of the legitimate consequences of war. But it was not
shell-shock. Roche was really possessed by the feeling that he would
never get out, never get home, smell fish and the sea, watch the
bottle-green breakers roll in on his native shore, the sun gleaming
through wave-crests lifted and flying back in spray, never know the
accustomed heave and roll under his feet, or carouse in a seaport
cabaret, or see his old mother--_la veuve_ Roche. And, after all, there
was a certain foundation for his fear. It was not as if this war could
be expected to stop some day. There they were, in the trenches, they and
the enemy set over against each other, 'like china dogs,' in the words
of Grandpere Poirot; and there they would be, so far as Roche's ungeared
nerves could grasp, for ever. And, while like china dogs they sat, he
knew that he would not be released, not allowed to go back to the sea
and the smells and the sounds thereof; for he had still all his limbs,
and no bullet-hole to show under his thick dark hair. No wonder he got
up the trees and looked out for sight of the waves, and fluttered the
weak nerves of the hospital 'Powers,' till they saw themselves burying
him with a broken spine, at the expense of the subscribers. Nothing to
be done for the poor fellow, except to take him motor-drives, and to
insist that he stayed in the dining-room long enough to eat some food.

Then, one bright day, a