-blackness!

When his sense returned to him he found himself lying in the curtained
corner of a big room. At least he thought it was big because of the
vast expanse of ceiling which he could see above the curtain rods and
the sounds without, some of which seemed to come from a distance. There
was a window, too, through which he caught sight of lawns and statues
and formal trees. Just then the curtain was drawn, and there appeared a
middle-aged woman dressed in white, looking very calm, very kind and
very spotless, who started a little when she saw that his eyes were
open and that his face was intelligent.

"Where am I?" he asked, and was puzzled to observe that the sound of
his voice seemed feeble and far away.

"In the hospital at Versailles," she answered in a pleasant voice.

"Indeed!" he murmured. "It occurred to me that it might be Heaven or
some place of the sort."

"If you looked through the curtain you wouldn't call it Heaven," she
said with a sigh, adding, "No, Major, you were near to 'going west,'
very near, but you never got to the gates of Heaven."

"I can't remember," he murmured again.

"Of course you can't, so don't try, for you see you got it in the head,
a bit of shell; and a nice operation, or rather operations, they had
over you. If it wasn't for that clever surgeon--but there, never mind."

"Shall I recover?"

"Of course you will. We have had no doubt about that for the last week;
you have been here nearly three, you know; only, you see, we thought
you might be blind, something to do with the nerves of the eyes. But it
appears that isn't so. Now be quiet, for I can't stop talking to you
with two dying just outside, and another whom I hope to save."

"One thing, Nurse--about the war. Have the Germans got Paris?"

"That's a silly question, Major, which makes me think you ain't so
right as I believed. If those brutes had Paris do you think you would
be at Versailles? Or, at any rate, that I should? Don't you bother
about the war. It's all right, or as right as it is likely to be for
many a long day."

Then she went.

A week later Godfrey was allowed to get out of bed and was even carried
to sit in the autumn sunshine among other shattered men. Now he learned
all there was to know; that the German rush had been stayed, that they
had been headed off from Calais, and that the armies were entrenching
opposite to each other and preparing for the winter, the Allied cause
having been saved,