ht arm. His mechanician lay limp. Even then he might have managed a
landing but the pursuing plane got in a final shot. There followed a
period of time that seemed to cover, say, six years but that was
actually only a matter of seconds. At the end of that period Giddy,
together with a tangle of wire, silk, wood, and something that had been
the mechanician, lay inside the German lines, and you would hardly have
thought him worth the disentangling.

They did disentangle him, though, and even patched him up pretty
expertly, but not so expertly, perhaps, as they might have, being enemy
surgeons and rather busy with the patching of their own injured. The
bone, for example, in the lower right arm, knitted promptly and
properly, being a young and healthy bone, but they rather over-looked
the matter of arm nerves and muscles, so that later, though it looked a
perfectly proper arm, it couldn't lift four pounds. His head had emerged
slowly, month by month, from swathings of gauze. What had been quite a
crevasse in his skull became only a scarlet scar that his hair pretty
well hid when he brushed it over the bad place. But the surgeon, perhaps
being overly busy, or having no real way of knowing that Giddy's nose
had been a distinguished and aristocratically hooked Gory nose, had
remoulded that wrecked feature into a pure Greek line at first sight of
which Giddy stood staring weakly into the mirror; reeling a little with
surprise and horror and unbelief and general misery. "Can this be I?" he
thought, feeling like the old man of the bramble bush in the Mother
Goose rhyme. A well-made and becoming nose, but not so fine looking as
the original feature had been, as worn by Giddy.

"Look here!" he protested to the surgeon, months too late. "Look here,
this isn't my nose."

"Be glad," replied that practical Prussian person, "that you have any."

With his knowledge of French and English and German Giddy acted as
interpreter during the months of his invalidism and later internment,
and things were not so bad with him. He had no news of his mother,
though, and no way of knowing whether she had news of him. With 1918,
and the Armistice and his release, he hurried to Paris and there got the
full impact of the past year's events.

Julia Gory was dead and the Gory money nonexistent.

Out of the ruins--a jewel or two and some paper not quite worthless--he
managed a few thousand francs and went to Nice. There he walked in the
sunshine, and