opped aghast. The door by which
they entered the salon was gone, and in its place was a huge gap in the
wall. The furniture was buried under a mass of debris, and instead of
the gilded ceiling above him was only the blue sky. The piano was still
untouched, but on the keys, and on the wall behind, were splashes of
blood. Lying on the ground near it, half covered in plaster, was David.
He forced himself to approach, and looked again. His friend's head was
completely smashed, and one arm was missing.

For some minutes he stood still, staring. Then, with a sudden quiver, he
turned and ran. In the garden he tripped over something, and fell, but
he felt no hurt, for mad terror was upon him, and all sense had gone.
He must get away from the dreadful thing in there; he must put miles
between himself and the vision; he must run ... run ... run....

IV

Two privates found him, wild-eyed and trembling, and brought him to a
medical officer. "Nerves, poor devil, and badly too!" was the diagnosis;
and before Jonathan really knew what had happened, he was in hospital in
Rouen.

Everyone gets "nervy" after a certain amount of modern warfare; even the
nerves of the least imaginative may snap before a sudden shock.

So with stolid Jonathan. After a year, he is still in England. "Why
doesn't he go out again?" people ask. "He looks well enough. He must be
slacking." But they realise nothing of the waiting at night for the
dreaded, oft-repeated dreams; they cannot tell of the horrible visions
that war can bring, they do not know what it means, that neurasthenia,
that hell on earth.

It is difficult to forget what must be forgotten. If you have "nerves"
you must do all you can to forget the things that caused them, but when
everything you do or say, think or hear, reminds you in some remote way
of all you must forget, then recovery is hard indeed.

That is why Jonathan is still in England. If he hears or reads of the
war he thinks of his dead friend: if he hears music--even a street
organ--the result is worse; if he tries to escape from it all, and hides
himself away in the country, the birds and the lilac blossom take him
back to that morning near Ypres, when he first realised how much his
friendship meant to him. And whenever he thinks of his friend, that
horrible corpse near the piano comes back before his tight-closed eyes,
and his hands tremble again in fear.

XV

THE RUM JAR

AND OTHER SOLDIER SUPERSTITIONS

Th