is getting medals. You feed their men and risk your life and
your reputation, and they give you a thing to pin on. It's cheap at the
price."

And later on those were Harvey's very words. But to be fair to him they
were but the sloughing of a wound that would not heal.

That evening Henri came again. He was, for the first time, his gay self
again--at least on the surface. It was as though, knowing what he was
going into, he would leave with Sara Lee no feeling, if he never
returned, that she had inflicted a lasting hurt. He was everywhere in
the little house, elbowing his way among the men with his cheery
nonsense, bantering the weary ones until they smiled, carrying hot water
for Sara Lee and helping her now and then with a bad dressing.

"If you would do it in this fashion, mademoiselle," he would say, "with
one turn of the bandage over the elbow--"

"But it won't hold that way."

"You say that to me, mademoiselle? I who have taught you all you know
of bandaging?"

They would wrangle a bit, and end by doing it in Sara Lee's way.

He had a fund of nonsense that he drew on, too, when a dressing was
painful. It would run like this, to an early accompaniment of groans:

"Pierre, what can you put in your left hand that you cannot place in the
right? Stop grunting like a pig, and think, man!"

Pierre would give a final rumble and begin to think deeply.

"I cannot think. I--in my left hand, _monsieur le capitaine_?"

"In your left hand."

The little crowd in the dressing room would draw in close about the table
to listen.

"I do not know, monsieur."

"Idiot!" Henri would say. "Your right elbow, man!"

And the dressing was done.

He had an inexhaustible stock of such riddles, almost never guessed. He
would tell the answer and then laugh delightedly. And pain seemed to
leave the little room when he entered it.

It was that night that Henri disappeared.

XVII

There was a question to settle, and it was for Henri to do it. Two
questions indeed. One was a matter of engineering, and before the bottom
fell out of his world Henri had studied engineering. The second was
more serious.

For the first, this thing had happened. Of all the trenches to be held,
the Belgians had undeniably the worst. Properly speaking they were not
trenches at all, but shallow gutters dug a foot or two into the saturated
ground and then built man-high with bags of earth or sand. Here and
there they were not dug at all, but w