moment, and then understood. It was a new word created
out of the dirt of modern war--"Delousing station."

XIV

It was harvest-time in the summer of '15, and Death was not the only
reaper who went about the fields, although he was busy and did not rest
even when the sun had flamed down below the belt of trees on the far
ridge, and left the world in darkness.

On a night in August two of us stood in a cornfield, silent, under the
great dome, staring up at the startling splendor of it. The red ball
just showed above the far line of single trees which were black as
charcoal on the edge of a long, straight road two miles away, and from
its furnace there were flung a million feathers of flame against the
silk-blue canopy of the evening sky. The burning colors died out in
a few minutes, and the fields darkened, and all the corn-shocks paled
until they became quite white, like rows of tents, under the harvest
moon. Another night had come in this year of war.

Up Ypres way the guns were busy, and at regular intervals the earth
trembled, and the air vibrated with dull, thunderous shocks.

"The moon's face looks full of irony to-night," said the man by my side.
"It seems to say, `What fools those creatures are down there, spoiling
their harvest-time with such a mess of blood!'"

The stars were very bright in some of those Flemish nights. I saw the
Milky Way clearly tracked across the dark desert. The Pleiades and
Orion's belt were like diamonds on black velvet. But among all these
worlds of light other stars, unknown to astronomers, appeared and
disappeared. On the road back from a French town one night I looked
Arras way, and saw what seemed a bursting planet. It fell with a scatter
of burning pieces. Then suddenly the thick cloth of the night was rent
with stabs of light, as though flashing swords were hacking it, and a
moment later a finger of white fire was traced along the black edge of
the far-off woods, so that the whole sky was brightened for a moment
and then was blotted out by a deeper darkness... Arras was being shelled
again, as I saw it many times in those long years of war.

The darkness of all the towns in the war zone was rather horrible. Their
strange, intense quietude, when the guns were not at work, made them
dead, as the very spirit of a town dies on the edge of war. One night,
as on many others, I walked through one of them with a friend. Every
house was shuttered, and hardly a gleam came thro