all the double line of noble poplar-trees, not one was standing. The utterly changed aspect of the familiar road startled him. Ahead of him as he tramped rapidly forward, was what had been a cross-roads, now a gaping hole. Nidart, used to gaping holes in roads, walked down into this, and out on the other side. He was panting a little, but he walked forward steadily and strongly....

The moon shone full on the place where the first village had stood, the one where his married sister had lived, where he and his wife and the children used to come for Sunday dinners once in a while. He stood suddenly before a low, confused huddle of broken bricks and splintered beams, and looked about him uncomprehending. The silence was intense. In the instant before he understood what he was seeing, he heard and felt a rapid vibration, his own heart knocking loudly. Then he understood.

A moment later, mechanically, he began to move about, clambering up and down, aimlessly, over the heaps of rubble. Although he did not know it, he was looking for the place where his sister's house had stood. Presently his knees gave way under him. He sat down suddenly on a tree-stump. The lopped-off trunk beside it showed it to have been an old cherry-tree. Yes, his sister's big cherry-tree, the pride of her garden. A long strip of paper, one end buried in a heap of bits of plaster, fluttered in the night-wind. It beat against his leg like some one calling feebly for help. The moon emerged from a cloud and showed it to be a strip of wall-paper; he recognized the pattern; he had helped his brother-in-law put it on the bedroom of the house. His sister's four children had been born within the walls of that bedroom. He tried to fix his mind on those children, not to think of any other children, not to remember his own, not to ...

The paper beat insistently and rhythmically against his leg like a recurrent thought of madness—he sprang up with the gesture of a man terrified, and stumbling wildly among the formless ruins sought for the road again.

He walked heavily after this, lifting his feet with an effort. Several miles further, at the heap of débris which had been Falquières, where his wife's family had lived, he made a wide detour through the fields to avoid passing closer to the ruins. At the next, Bondry, where he had been born and brought up, he tried to turn aside, but against his will his feet carried him straight to the center of the chaos. When the first livid light of dawn showed him the two stumps of the big apple-trees before the door, which his grandfather had planted, he stopped short. Of the house, of the old walled garden, not a trace beyond the shapeless heap of stones and plaster. He stood there a long time, staring silently. The light gradually brightened, until across the level fields a ray of yellow sunshine struck ironically through the prone branches of the murdered trees upon the gray face of the man.

At this he turned and, walking slowly, dragging his feet, his head hanging, his shoulders bent, he followed the road which led like a white tape laid straight across the plain, towards—towards ... The road had been mined at regular intervals, deep and broad craters stretching across it, enough to stop a convoy of camions, not enough to stop a single soldier, even though he stumbled along so wearily, his cumbersome packages beating against his legs and arms, even though he walked so slowly, more and more slowly as he came in sight of the next heaped and tumbled mound of débris. The sun rose higher....

Presently it shone, with April clarity, on Nidart lying, face downwards, upon a heap of broken bricks.

For a long hour it showed nothing but that,—the ruins, the prostrate trees, the man, like them stricken and laid low.

Then it showed, poor and miserable under that pale-gold light, a wretched ant-like procession issuing from holes in the ground and defiling slowly along the scarred road towards the ruins; women, a few old men, a little band of pale and silent children. They approached the ruins and dispersed. One of the women, leading three children, picked her way wearily among the heaps of stone, the charred and twisted beams ... stopped short, both hands at her heart.

And then the sun reeled in the sky to a sound which rang as strangely from that silent desolation as a burst of song out of hell, scream after scream of joy, ringing up to the very heavens, frantic, incredulous, magnificent joy.

There they stood, the man and wife, clasped in each others' arms in the ruins of their home, with red, swollen eyes, smiling with quivering lips, silent. Now that the first wild cries had gone rocket-like to the sky and fallen back in a torrent of tears, they had no words, no words at all. They clasped each other and the children, and wept, constantly wiping the tears from their white cheeks, to see each other. The two older children, a little shy of this father whom they had almost forgotten, drew away constrained, hanging their heads, looking up bashfully under their bent brows. Nidart sat down on a heap of stone and drew the little girl to him, stroking her hair. He tried to speak, but no voice issued from his lips. His wife sat down beside him, laying her head on his shoulder, spent with the excess of her relief. They were all silent a long time, their hearts beginning to beat in the old rhythm, a sweet, pale peace dropping down upon them.

After a time, the youngest child, cowering under the woman's skirts, surprised at the long silence, thrust out a little pale face from his shelter. The man looked down on him and smiled. "That's a Dupré," he said in his normal voice, with conviction, all his village lore coming back to him. "I know by the Dupré look of his nose. He looks the way my cousin Jacques Dupré used to, when he was little."

These were the first articulate words spoken. With them, he turned his back on the unfriendly, unknowable immensity of the world in which he had lived, exiled, for three years, and returned into the close familiar community of neighbors and kin where he had lived for thirty-four years,—where he had lived for hundreds of years. The pulverized wreck of this community lay all about him, but he opened its impalpable doors and stepped once more into its warm humanity. He looked at the little child whom he had never seen before and knew him for kin.

His wife nodded. "Yes, it's Louise and Jacques' baby. Louise was expecting him, you know, when the mobilization ... he was born just after Jacques went away, in August. We heard Jacques was killed ... we have heard everything ... that Paris was taken, that London was burned.... I have heard twice that you were killed. Louise believed it, and never got out of bed at all after the baby came. She just turned over and let herself die. I took the baby. Somebody had to. That's the reason I'm here now. 'They' carried off all the women my age unless they had children under three. They thought the baby was mine.'

"But Jacques isn't killed," said Nidart; "he's wounded, with one wooden leg, frantic to see Louise and the baby...." He made a gesture of blame. "Louise always was a fool! Anybody's a fool to give up!" He looked down at the baby and held out his hand. "Come here, little Jeannot."

The child shrank away silently, burrowing deeper into his foster-mother's skirts.

"He's afraid," she explained. "We've had to make the children afraid so they would keep out of sight, and not break rules. There were so many rules, so many to salute and to bow to, the children couldn't remember; and when they forgot, they were so dreadfully cuffed, or their parents fined such big fines...."

"I never saluted!" said the boy of ten, wagging his head proudly. "You have to have something on your head to salute, they won't let you do it bareheaded. So I threw my cap in the fire."

"Yes, he's gone bareheaded since the first days, summer and winter, rain and shine," said his mother.

"Here, Jean-Pierre," said his father, wrestling with one of his packages, "I've