of the Gothic
workmen.

"And you say we've progressed," he whispered to Tom Randolph.

"God, it is fine."

They wandered up and down the road a long time, silently, looking at the
tall apse of the abbey, breathing the cool night air, moist with mist,
in which now and then was the huddled, troubling smell of soldiers. At
last the moon, huge and swollen with gold, set behind the wooded hills,
and they went back to the car, where they rolled up in their blankets
and went to sleep.

Behind the square lantern that rose over the crossing, there was a trap
door in the broken tile roof, from which you could climb to the
observation post in the lantern. Here, half on the roof and half on the
platform behind the trap-door, Martin would spend the long summer
afternoons when there was no call for the ambulance, looking at the
Gothic windows of the lantern and the blue sky beyond, where huge soft
clouds passed slowly over, darkening the green of the woods and of the
weed-grown fields of the valley with their moving shadows.

There was almost no activity on that part of the front. A couple of
times a day a few snapping discharges would come from the seventy-fives
of the battery behind the Abbey, and the woods would resound like a
shaken harp as the shells passed over to explode on the crest of the
hill that blocked the end of the valley where the Boches were.

Martin would sit and dream of the quiet lives the monks must have passed
in their beautiful abbey so far away in the Forest of the Argonne,
digging and planting in the rich lands of the valley, making flowers
bloom in the garden, of which traces remained in the huge beds of
sunflowers and orange marigolds that bloomed along the walls of the
dormitory. In a room in the top of the house he had found a few torn
remnants of books; there must have been a library in the old days, rows
and rows of musty-smelling volumes in rich brown calf worn by use to a
velvet softness, and in cream-coloured parchment where the finger-marks
of generations showed brown; huge psalters with notes and chants
illuminated in green and ultramarine and gold; manuscripts out of the
Middle Ages with strange script and pictures in pure vivid colours;
lives of saints, thoughts polished by years of quiet meditation of old
divines; old romances of chivalry; tales of blood and death and love
where the crude agony of life was seen through a dawn-like mist of
gentle beauty.

"God! if there were somewhere no