The face of the man was weary and weak. It showed all of his forty-one years, and revealed, too, a great emptiness. Flies kept rising and settling again on the hands, the face, and the head of the man - moist flies whose feet felt damp on the skin. They were slow and languid flies which wanted to settle and stay. It was his breathing that made them restless, but not enough to clear them away, only enough to make a low buzzing in the sultry room. Across the top of his head a bald streak ran from the forehead, and it was here they returned to alight, after each twitching and heave of the sunken body.

In the early months he had fought a losing fight with them. The walls and ceiling and panes of glass were spotted with the marks of his long battle. But his foes had advanced in ever-fresh force, clouds and swarms of them beyond number. He had gone to meet them with a wire-killer, and tightly rolled newspapers. He had imported fly paper from Dunkirk. But they could afford to sacrifice the few hundreds, which his strokes could reach, and still overwhelm him. Lately, he had given up the struggle, and let them take possession of the room. They harassed him when he read, so he gave up reading. They got into the food, so he ate less. Between his two trips to the front daily at 8 A.M. and 2 P.M., he slept. He found he could lose himself in sleep. Into that kingdom of sleep, they could not enter. As the weeks rolled on, he was able to let himself down more and more easily into silence. That became his life. A slothfulness, a languor, even when awake, a half-conscious forcing of himself through the routine work, a looking forward to the droning room, and then the settling deep into the old plush chair, and the blessed unconsciousness.

He drove a Red Cross ambulance to the French lines at Nieuport, collected the sick and wounded soldiers and brought them to the Poste de Secours, two miles back of the trenches. He lived a hundred feet from the Poste, always within call. But the emergency call rarely came. There were only the set runs, for the war had settled to its own regularity. A wonderful idleness hung over the lines, where millions of men were unemployed, waiting with strange patience for some unseen event. Only the year before, these men were chatting in cafes, and busy in a thousand ways. Now, the long hours of the day were lived without activity in thoughtless routine. Under the routine there was always the sense of waiting for a sudden crash and horror.

The man was an English gentleman. It was his own car he had brought, paid for by him, and he had offered his car and services to the Fusiliers Marins. They had been glad of his help, and for twelve months he had performed his daily duty and returned to his loneliness. The men under whom he worked were the French doctors of the Poste - the chief doctor, Monsieur Claude-Marie Le Bot, with four stripes on his arm, and the courteous, grave administrator, Eustache-Emmanuel Couillandre, a three-stripes man, and a half dozen others, of three stripes and two. They had welcomed him to their group when he came to them from London. They had found him lively and likable, bringing gossip of the West End with a dash of Leicester Square. Then slowly a change had come on him. He went moody and silent.

"What's the matter with you?" asked Doctor Le Bot one day.

"Nothing's the matter with me," answered the man. "It's war that's the matter."

"What do you mean by that?" put in one of the younger doctors.

"The trouble with war," began the man slowly, "isn't that there's danger and death. They are easy. The trouble with war is this. It's dull, damned deadly dull. It's the slowest thing in the world. It wears away at your mind, like water dripping on a rock. The old Indian torture of letting water fall on your skull, drop by drop, till you went raving crazy, is nothing to what war does to the mind of millions of men. They can't think of anything else but war, and they have no thoughts about that. They can't talk of another blessed thing, and the result is they have nothing to say at all."