ing
forward to the droning room, and then the settling deep into the old
plush chair, and the blessed unconsciousness.

He drove a Red Cross ambulance to the French lines at Nieuport,
collected the sick and wounded soldiers and brought them to the Poste de
Secours, two miles back of the trenches. He lived a hundred feet from
the Poste, always within call. But the emergency call rarely came. There
were only the set runs, for the war had settled to its own regularity. A
wonderful idleness hung over the lines, where millions of men were
unemployed, waiting with strange patience for some unseen event. Only
the year before, these men were chatting in cafes, and busy in a
thousand ways. Now, the long hours of the day were lived without
activity in thoughtless routine. Under the routine there was always the
sense of waiting for a sudden crash and horror.

The man was an English gentleman. It was his own car he had brought,
paid for by him, and he had offered his car and services to the
Fusiliers Marins. They had been glad of his help, and for twelve months
he had performed his daily duty and returned to his loneliness. The men
under whom he worked were the French doctors of the Poste--the chief
doctor, Monsieur Claude-Marie Le Bot, with four stripes on his arm, and
the courteous, grave administrator, Eustache-Emmanuel Couillandre, a
three-stripes man, and a half dozen others, of three stripes and two.
They had welcomed him to their group when he came to them from London.
They had found him lively and likable, bringing gossip of the West End
with a dash of Leicester Square. Then slowly a change had come on him.
He went moody and silent.

"What's the matter with you?" asked Doctor Le Bot one day.

"Nothing's the matter with me," answered the man. "It's war that's the
matter."

"What do you mean by that?" put in one of the younger doctors.

"The trouble with war," began the man slowly, "isn't that there's danger
and death. They are easy. The trouble with war is this. It's dull,
damned deadly dull. It's the slowest thing in the world. It wears away
at your mind, like water dripping on a rock. The old Indian torture of
letting water fall on your skull, drop by drop, till you went raving
crazy, is nothing to what war does to the mind of millions of men. They
can't think of anything else but war, and they have no thoughts about
that. They can't talk of another blessed thing, and the result is they
have nothing to say at all."