"While he had been patiently reconstructing the lost gun, some damned idiot had found it in a corner. And Boulton had to spend two years of clever manipulation of his books to account for the new gun which had been evolved out of nothing." "Messiou," said the colonel, "do you remember the gate-keeper at Hondezeele? I should not have thought it of her." "No more should I," said Aurelle. "She was very pretty." "Messiou!" said the padre. *CHAPTER XVII* "Doctor," said the padre, "give me a cigar." "Are you aware, padre, that my cigars were rolled on the bare thighs of the young girls of Havana?" "O’Grady," said the colonel severely, "I consider that remark out of place." "Give me one all the same," said the padre. "I must smoke a cigar to help me find a text for my sermon. The quartermaster made me promise to go and see the motor-drivers who are at the back, and I don’t know what to talk to them about." "Look here, padre, I will give you an appropriate text; lend me your Bible a moment. Ah, here it is. Listen! ’But David said, Ye shall not do so, my brethren, with that which the Lord hath given us ... but as his part is that goeth down to the battle, so shall his part be that tarrieth by the stuff; they shall part alike.’" "Admirable," said the padre, "admirable! But tell me, O’Grady, how is it that an old sinner like you knows the Holy Scriptures so well?" "I studied the Book of Samuel a good deal from an asylum doctor’s point of view," said the doctor. "Saul’s neurasthenia interested me. His attacks are very well described. I have also diagnosed the madness of Nebuchadnezzar. They were two very different types. Saul was apathetic and Nebuchadnezzar violent." "I wish you would leave Nebuchadnezzar alone," said the colonel. "I am very much afraid of asylum doctors," said Major Parker. "Violent, depressed, or apathetic, we are all mad, according to them." "What do you call mad?" said the doctor. "I certainly can see in you, and in the colonel, and Aurelle, all the phenomena which I observed in the asylum." "Ugh!" said the colonel, horrified. "But I do, sir. Between Aurelle, who forgets the war by reading Tolstoi, and some of my old friends who thought they were Napoleon or Mahomet, there is a difference in degree but not in nature. Aurelle browses on novels from a morbid desire to live the life of someone else; my patients substitute for their miserable life that of some great personage whose history they have read and whose lot they envy.