Before him, knee-deep in poppies, moved half a dozen figures in khaki.
“The boys are gathering flowers for the funeral,” he was told.
“The funeral?...”
“Of the men killed last night....”
Presently, his business completed, he was driving toward Paris, reached Paris in the darkness with a feeling of home-coming and pleasure.... But he was thoughtful, troubled. His sternly believing mother was awake in him, asserting that he had seen with his own eyes a movement of the finger of God—that he had read a sign from Omnipotence. It weighed him down, filled him not with joyous faith, but with Calvinistic gloom to have this assurance that God was actually taking an active interest in His world.... The weight of the knowledge of the existence of a Deity was upon him as it had been upon his stern forebears—the knowledge of the existence of a Deity, stern, forbidding, cruel in his revenges and implacable in his demands ... not of such a God as Andree knew—whose eyes might be wet with tears caused by the sufferings of His puppets to whom He had vouchsaved the dubious boon of freedom of action....
He awoke in the morning as one awakes from an impressive dream, with a feeling of heaviness upon him, a consciousness of his personal existence that made him dull company at breakfast. This humor did not pass away, it was rather laid aside for further reference and obscured by the events and anticipations of the day.
“Good trip?” asked Bert.
“Fine! Saw a lot.”
“Wish I could get a crack at it sometime. I haven’t heard a gun go off yet—except in an air raid.... Was anything stirring up there?”
Ken described his experiences of the day and night, and, strangely, from a different viewpoint than that from which he had beheld them. Yesterday the thing had been subjective, symbolical; to-day it was objective. He described the war he had seen as a tourist might describe some interesting scene in a foreign country—and he rather wondered at himself that he could think of it in that manner.