Once, twice, three times Courney had been a stepping-stone in the swept and garnished pathways of battle. Back in September of 1914 the Germans, sweeping southward as an irresistible force, took possession of this town, after shelling it quite flat with their big guns to drive out the defending garrison of French and British. Then, a little later, in front of Paris the irresistible force met the immovable body and answered the old, old question of the scientists; and, as the Germans fell back to dig themselves in along the Somme and the Aisne, there was again desperate hard fighting here, and many, very many, lives were spent in the effort of one side to take and retain, and of the other to gain and hold fast, the little peaky heaps of wreckage protruding above the stumps of the wasted orchard trees. Now, though, for a long time things had been quiet in Courney. Though placed in debatable territory, as the campaign experts regard debatable territory, it had lapsed into an eddy and a backwater of war, becoming, so to speak, a void and a vacuum amid the twisting currents of the war. In the core of a tornado there may be calm while about it the vortex swirls and twists. If this frequently is true of windstorms it occasionally is true of wars. Often to the right of them and to the left of them, sometimes far in front of them, and once in a while far back in the rear of them, those who still abode at Courney heard the distant voices of the big guns; but their place of habitation, by reasons of shifts in the war game, was no longer on a route of communication between separate groups of the same fighting force. It was not even on a line of travel. No news of the world beyond their limited horizon seeped in to them. They did not know how went the war--who won or who lost--and almost they had quit desiring to know. What does one colony of blind worms in a bank care how fares it with colonies of blind worms in other banks? You think this state of apathy could not come to pass? Well, I know that it can, because with my own eyes I saw it coming to pass in the times while yet the war was new; while it yet was a shock and an affront to our beliefs; and you must remember that now I write of a much later time, when the world war had become the world's custom. Also, could you have looked in upon the surviving remnant of the inhabitants of Courney, you would have had a clearer and fuller corroboration of the fact I state, because then you would have seen that here in this place lived only those who were too old or too feeble to care, or else were too young to understand. All tallied, there were not more then than twenty remaining of two or three hundred who once had been counted as the people of this inconsequential village; and of these but two were individuals in what ordinarily would be called the prime of life.