He filed, he copied, he ate his rations—and from the beaten track of his everyday life, the war seemed very far away. Sometimes in his off-hours, afternoon or evening, he would tramp up the hills that held the little town as in a cup to a point where, looking eastward, he could see the sudden flashes of the guns. The bright, fierce flashes in the evening sky were war, real war made visible and wickedly beautiful; such war as he had seen in the Ardennes village, and such as he had dreamed of fighting when he first donned his khaki tunic. And instead a chair and a typewriter in the Rue Ernest Dupont, the papers to be filed that a girl might have filed, the round of safe and disciplined monotony. That was war as he knew it: an office with flashes in the distance. For a few days after his arrival in France his new surroundings interested him—the cobbled roads, the build of the houses, the sound of French in the streets; but once their strangeness had worn off he accepted and ceased to notice them. He was not sufficiently educated, sufficiently imaginative or observant, to take at anything beyond their face-value the various and incongruous types of humanity with which he was brought into contact. The strange life of Northern France affected him only where it touched him personally, and to him the sight of a turbaned brown trooper bargaining in the market-place with a swift-spoken, bare-headed Frenchwoman was an oddity and nothing more; just as the flamboyant façade of the great church of St. Nicholas was an oddity, a building unlike, in its mass and its detail of statuary, to the churches he knew of in London. He came across many such oddities—and having no meaning for him, they made but a passing impression. After a week or two he no longer turned his head at the sight of a gang of Annamite labourers or the passing of a detachment of heavy-booted German prisoners marched campwards at the end of their day; these things, like the ambulances crawling in a convoy from the station, like the shuttered French houses built squarely round courtyards, became part of the background of his daily life and he ceased to wonder or reflect on them. Perhaps his contact with alien races, with strange buildings and habits once unknown, may have increased his vague sense of the impossibility of fitting all men to one pattern, and of solving the problems of human misgovernment and government by means of the simple and sweeping expedients he had once been so glib in upholding; but on the whole it left him unaffected because little interested. His course of Free Library reading had placed him in possession of certain scattered facts concerning France, facts dealing chiefly with the First Napoleon and the German War of 1870; but for all the hot interest they had stirred in him once, they gave him small insight into the forces that had gone to the making of the country in which his life was spent wearily.