Sightless: thrown back into the discard. But there was the same firm mouth and the same upright carriage of the well-shaped head. Broken? Not a bit of it. Everyone could see that. The old spirit was there, just as gallant as when he had set out for the battlefields of France. “This Article No. 10,” continued the sergeant. “You don’t know how strange it sounds. Because I’ve come straight home from over there, you know. I was going to say, without seeing anything on the way.” He smiled. “And that’s true, too. What I mean is, I haven’t had time to get adjusted to the change. It wasn’t till just now that I said to myself, the war’s thousands of miles off, way across the ocean. Not that the ocean would stop Fritz from getting at us mighty quick if he ever beats us over there. You may depend on that. “Some one has to make the things that are needed and get paid for them. That’s of course. But I haven’t been seeing that side. I’ve been seeing France and England and our own boys with their backs to the wall. I’ve been seeing new graveyards grow; bigger than big towns—as big as cities. And cities that were nothing but graveyards. Towns that were nothing but ash heaps. Rich lands churned up into terrible deserts. “And I’ve met men—met them all the time—who’d been seeing the same and worse in Russia and Poland, Serbia and Roumania—the whole Christian world being battered and ripped to pieces. “That is the way you think about it over there. What can you do to stop it—how can you help the millions that have lost their fathers or mothers, husbands or wives, or children—that have no food or homes or country? That is what you ask yourself day and night. “You can never give them back what they have lost. But if you had money, you could keep some of them from dying of cold and hunger; little children at least. That is about all money means to you over there. “So when I come home to hear that Fenville has grown rich, why, I can’t seem to sense it! And that you want to fix up Farragut Square,—make it pretty,—buy the town a kind of decoration because it has been lucky enough and smart enough to make money—out of the war. It’s like blood money to me—like blood itself; a drop for every penny.” Fenville had never tolerated criticism, but the man in the faded uniform with the cross on his tunic and his head up, and his poor, blind, scarred face, exerted a strange influence over the audience. Even the least imaginative man had his vision of what that figure symbolized. “It was looking at him, as much as hearing him speak—why, I seemed to get a sight right over to France as clear as if I had been there,” explained Mr. Totten afterwards. “France made Farragut Square look kind of small.”