Troy, as he crept away, heard one young man, pink and shock-headed, murmur shyly to the prophetess: "Hearing you say this has made it all so clear to me"—and an elderly gentleman, adjusting his eye-glasses, added with nasal emphasis: "Yes, Miss Warlick has expressed in a very lovely way what we all feel; that America's mission is to contribute the human element to this war."
"Oh, good God," Troy groaned, crawling to his darkened cabin. He remembered M. Gantier's phrase: "Self-satisfaction is death," and felt a sudden yearning for Sophy Wicks' ironic eyes and her curt: "What's the use of jawing?"
He had been for six months on his job, and was beginning to know something about it: to know, for instance, that nature had never meant him for an ambulance-driver. Nevertheless he had stuck to his task with such a dogged determination to succeed that after several months about the Paris hospitals he was beginning to be sent to exposed sectors.
His first sight of the desolated country he had traversed three years earlier roused old memories of the Gantier family, and he wrote once more to their little town, but again without result. Then one day he was sent to a sector of the Vosges which was held by American troops. His heart was beating hard as the motor rattled over the hills, through villages empty of their inhabitants, like those of the Marne, but swarming with big fair-haired soldiers. The land lifted and dipped again, and he saw ahead of him the ridge once crowned by M. Gantier's village, and the wall of the terraced garden, with the horn-beam arbour putting forth its early green. Everything else was in ruins: pale weather-bleached ruins over which the rains and suns of three years had passed effacingly. The church, once so firm and four-square on the hill, was now a mere tracery against the clouds; the hospice roofless, the houses all gutted and bulging, with black smears of smoke on their inner walls. At the head of the street a few old women and children were hoeing vegetables before a row of tin-roofed shanties, and a Y. M. C. A. hut flew the stars and stripes across the way.
Troy jumped down, and began to ask questions. At first the only person who recognized the name of Gantier was an old woman too frightened and feebleminded to answer intelligibly. Then a French territorial who was hoeing with the women came forward. He belonged to the place and knew the story.
"M. Gantier—the old gentleman? He was mayor, and the Germans took him. He died in Germany. The young girl—Mlle. Gantier—was taken with him. No, she's not dead . . . I don't know . . . She's shut up somewhere in Germany . . . queer in the head, they say. . . . The sons—ah, you knew Monsieur Paul? He went first . . . What, the others? . . . Yes; the three others—Louis at Notre Dame de Lorette; Jean on a submarine; poor little Félix, the youngest, of the fever at Salonika. Voilà . . . The old lady? Ah, she and her sister went away . . . some charitable people took them, I don't know where . . . I've got the address somewhere . . ."