t step off the narrow track marked with white stones, lest they should
be drowned in the mud. They passed the head of a dead horse. It looked
as if it had been cut off and laid there; the body was below it in the
mud.

They spoke in whispers, and Joan at first had made an effort to disguise
her voice. But her conductor had smiled. "They shall be called the
brothers and the sisters of the Lord," he had said. "Mademoiselle is
brave for her Brothers' sake." He was a priest. There were many priests
among the stretcher-bearers.

Crouching close to the ground, behind the spreading roots of a giant oak,
she raised her eyes. Before her lay a sea of smooth, soft mud nearly a
mile wide. From the centre rose a solitary tree, from which all had been
shot away but two bare branches like outstretched arms above the silence.
Beyond, the hills rose again. There was something unearthly in the
silence that seemed to brood above that sea of mud. The old priest told
her of the living men, French and German, who had stood there day and
night sunk in it up to their waists, screaming hour after hour, and
waving their arms, sinking into it lower and lower, none able to help
them: until at last only their screaming heads were left, and after a
time these, too, would disappear: and the silence come again.

She saw the ditches, like long graves dug for the living, where the
weary, listless men stood knee-deep in mud, hoping for wounds that would
relieve them from the ghastly monotony of their existence; the holes of
muddy water where the dead things lay, to which they crept out in the
night to wash a little of the filth from their clammy bodies and their
stinking clothes; the holes dug out of the mud in which they ate and
slept and lived year after year: till brain and heart and soul seemed to
have died out of them, and they remembered with an effort that they once
were men.

* * * * *

After a time, the care of the convalescents passed almost entirely into
Joan's hands, Madame Lelanne being told off to assist her. By dint of
much persistence she had succeeded in getting the leaky roof repaired,
and in place of the smoky stove that had long been her despair she had
one night procured a fine calorifere by the simple process of stealing
it. Madame Lelanne had heard about it from the gossips. It had been
brought to a lonely house at the end of the village by a major of
engineers. He had returned to the trenches the day before, an