"Hullo, old man! What sort of a time have you had?" "Top-hole. How's yourself? Was that your memsahib at the station?" "Yes. Dislike women at these partings as a general rule--but she's wonderful." "They're pulling the brigade out to rest, I hear." "So I believe. Anyway, I hope they've buried that dead Hun just in front of us. He was getting beyond a joke...." He is back in the life over the water again; there is nothing incongruous to him in his sequence of remarks; the time of his leave has been too short for the contrast to strike him. In fact, the whirl of gaiety in which he has passed his seven days seems more unreal than his other life--than the dead German. And it is only when a man is wounded and comes home to get fit, when he idles away the day in the home of his fathers, with a rod or a gun to help him back to convalescence, when the soothing balm of utter peace and contentment creeps slowly through his veins, that he looks back on the past few months as a runner on a race just over. He has given of his best; he is ready to give of his best again; but at the moment he is exhausted; panting, but at rest For the time the madness has left him; he is sane. But it is only for the time.... * * * * * He is able to think coherently; he is able to look on things in their proper perspective. He knows. The bits in the kaleidoscope begin to group coherently, to take definite form, and he views the picture from the standpoint of a rational man. To him the leave-train contains no illusions; the territory is not unknown. No longer does a dead Hun dwarf his horizon to the exclusion of all else. He has looked on the thing from close quarters; he has been mad with passion and shaking with fright; he has been cold and wet, he has been hot and thirsty. Like a blaze of tropical vegetation from which individual colours refuse to be separated, so does the jumble of his life in Flanders strike him as he looks back on it. Isolated occurrences seem unreal, hard to identify. The little things which then meant so much now seem so paltry; the things he hardly noticed now loom big. Above all, the grim absurdity of the whole thing strikes him; civilisation has at last been defined.... He marvels that men can be such wonderful, such super-human fools; his philosophy changes. He recalls grimly the particular night on which he crept over a dirty ploughed field and scrambled into a shell-hole as he saw the thin green streak of a German flare like a bar of light against the blackness; then the burst--the ghostly light flooding the desolate landscape--the crack of a solitary rifle away to his left. And as the flare came slowly hissing down, a ball of fire, he saw the other occupant of his hiding-place--a man's leg, just that, nothing more. And he laughs; the thing is too absurd. It is; it is absurd; it is monstrous, farcical. The realisation has come to him; he is sane--for a time.