Dick followed every detail of that cruel and valiant struggle. He had a talent for the visualization of physical things which he had trained until it was instinctive. Topography, contour, forests and fields, towns, farms, churches, the turn of streets and the winding of rivers, the look of shop fronts, the town square, its fountains and statues, the town promenade, the costumes of men and women, the cattle they prized, the horses they drove, the dogs at their heels--he saw them all. It had been his play in travel to anticipate what he was to see, and then to compare with what he found. With much travel, gaining knowledge of things as they are and as the books say them to be, Dick had grown amazingly clever in this play of construction. But since the war this faculty had become a torture. It was so much a part of him that he could no more prevent its operating than he could prevent his mind from instinctively forming judgments. But never in the war had he been so cruelly tormented as by the scenes which passed before his eyes, as real as the streets of Sabinsport, every time that he saw or heard the word "Gallipoli." True, his affections were deeply touched. Some of the best friends of his Oxford days were there, and one by one he learned they would never return. The sandy, burning, treeless, waterless tongue of land, with its scanty footholds for the English and its sheltered pits for the enemy that from over their heads in the heights poured fire and death on them, to him seemed like some hideous dragon--a dragon fifty-seven miles long, carrying on back and in belly every weapon of destruction known to man and nature. He grew sick and faint as he saw men he loved making their landings through spitting shell and shrapnel, saw them crawling through mesquite and sand to attack, saw them wounded and abandoned, going mad under the burning sun or dying of pain and exhaustion where they lay on beach or hillside. It was infernal; a mad, romantic adventure, gallantly, chivalrously undertaken and carried on to its ghastly failure. Dick could neither forgive nor forget Gallipoli. Then came the attack on Verdun--and the crust broke in Sabinsport. He was no longer alone now in his anxiety. Everybody _cared_. There was Patsy. Patsy was wild with fury and with dread. The day and night she had spent in Verdun in August, 1914--preceded and followed as it was by much looking at fortifications and listening to much clear explanations by her friends and the officers who piloted them--had given Patsy a keen sense of what Verdun meant for both attacked and defenders. All that she had seen and heard, all the confidence she had of the impregnability of the place when there--her sense of surprise that the French officers should look serious, even anxious--had been shattered by the events of Belgium's invasion. Did not Namur have encircling forts? Had she not seen their guns and heard tales of their strength, and had not the Germans _walked_ into Namur?