When Jim Denver told Lady Alice Conway that he was sane again, he spoke no more than the truth. A few weeks in France, and then a shattered arm had brought him back to England with more understanding than he had ever possessed before. He had gone out the ordinary Englishman--casual, sporting, easy going, somewhat apathetic; he had come back a thinker as well, at times almost a dreamer. It affects different men in different ways--but none escape. And that is what those others cannot understand--those others who have not been across. Even the man who comes back on short leave hardly grasps how the thing has changed him: hardly realises that the madness is still in his soul. He has not time; his leave is just an interlude. He is back again in France almost before he realises he has left it. In mind he has never left it. There is humour there in plenty--farce even; boredom, excitement, passion, hatred. Every human emotion runs its full gamut in the Land of Topsy Turvy; in the place where the life of a man is no longer three-score years and ten, but just so long as the Great Reaper may decide and no more. And you are caught in the whirl--you are tossed here and there by a life of artificiality, a life not of one's own seeking, but a life which, having once caught you, you are loath to let go. Which is a hard saying, and one impossible of comprehension to those who wait behind--to the wives, to the mothers, to the women. To them the leave-train pulling slowly out of Victoria Station, with their man waving a last adieu from the carriage window, means the ringing down of the curtain once again. The unknown has swallowed him up--the unknown into which they cannot follow him. Be he in a Staff office at the base or with his battalion in the trenches, he has gone where the woman to whom he counts as all the world cannot even picture him in her mind. To her Flanders is Flanders and war is war--and there are casualty lists. What matter that his battalion is resting; what matter that he is going through a course somewhere at the back of beyond? He has gone into the Unknown; the whistle of the train steaming slowly out is the voice of the call-boy at the drop curtain. And now the train has passed out of sight--or is it only that her eyes are dim with the tears she kept back while he was with her? At last she turns and goes blindly back to the room where they had breakfast; she sees once more the chair he used, the crumpled morning paper, the discarded cigarette. And there let us leave her with tear-stained face and a pathetic little sodden handkerchief clutched in one hand. "O God! dear God! send him back to me." Our women do not show us this side very much when we are on leave; perhaps it is as well, for the ground on which we stand is holy.... * * * * * And what of the man? The train is grinding through Herne Hill when he puts down his _Times_ and catches sight of another man in his brigade also returning from leave.