Big Belt was alone with his friend again, but Peter seemed merely the body of a man, not much use. They were kept very close by the Germans, and told that they were to be sent as soon as possible to the big prison-hospital at Sondreig. Even German correspondents were not permitted afield. Judenbach was retained, but the Americans were by the of service with Colonel Ulrich's force, and on the afternoon of the third day following the German entry, they looked back upon the little hill-town a last time. Though there had not been sound nor sight of Berthe nor the group around her, during the three days, Peter was different afield, as if he missed a certain personal identification with that obscure Galician settlement where so much had happened. He moved about as if there were something dead inside. His world had turned insane.  
Those were the terrible days of November, and the two Americans were forgotten at length—as a pair of buttons on the German uniform, forgotten because they served and were not in the way. All that had not to do with Berthe Wyndham was black as the Prussian night to Mowbray's brain, but Big Belt was always by. He could not have managed except for that. There were days in which it appeared as if half the world were down and bleeding; the other half trying to lift, pulling at the edges of the fallen, as one half-stupefied would pull at a fallen body in a burning house.
 
At night through the silences between the , sometimes over the hills through the cold rains, came to Peter Mowbray's ears the sounds of church-bells. Boylan did not always hear them. The German officers declared that there were no such sounds. Boylan's sack was filled with blood.
 
“If I ever get out of here,” he said, “I'll write one story—one battle till I die—and I'll call it 'Vintage Fourteen'.”
 
For he was sick of the spilled wine of men. And other armies were fighting in the vineyards of France—as were these in the piney hills of the ancient shepherd kings; and what a it was for the manhandled lands of Europe—potash and phosphor and nitrogen in the perfect solution of the human blood.
 
More and more Boylan saw that Peter was queer.
 
“I can't think,” the latter would say. “I feel like a man dying, under a mountain of dead. Mostly I don't want to live. I don't want to die. I believe that it's all one and that this is the end of the world.”
 
Peter could work, however. Day and night when they would let him, and mostly the Germans accepted his services gratefully now, he at the dead and the dying in the field and in the field hospitals. And with the lanterns at night, often under fire, often so long that Boylan could not rest, but would wait at the hospital-division like a mother for a dissipated son.
 
“They call this the great German fighting machine,” Peter whispered to Boylan one night, “but we're inside. We can't call it that. It's the most pitiful and devitalized thing that ever ran up and down the earth. And it doesn't mean anything. It's all waste—like a great body itself piece by piece—all waste and death.”
 
He tried to make death easy for a soldier here and there, but there was so much. His clothing smelled of death; and one morning before the smoke fell, he watched the sun shining upon the pine-clad hills. That moment the thought held him that the pine trees were , and men just the dung of the earth.
 
...One night Boylan asked as they lay down:
 
“Who are you?”
 
“Peter Mowbray.”
 
“Yep, and I'm Boylan. You're at liberty to correct if wrong. Are we ever going to die or get out?”
 
“I don't know.... Boylan, you've been good to me. We're two to make one—eye to eye—”
 
“You're making a noise like breaking down again. Don't, Peter. I've gone on a all my life. I'm a rotten sentimentalist at heart—soft as smashed grapes. It's my devil. If you break down, I'll show him to you—”
 
“It wouldn't hurt you to like a girl.”
 
“Maybe not, but I'd shoot my head off first.”
 
“Did you see the old leprous peasant to-day? He was hump-backed, and he had no lips, but teeth like a dog. He pulled at a soldier's stirrup as we came into town. The soldier was afraid and shot him through the mouth—”
 
“Shut up, Peter, or you'll get me. I've shown you more now than any living soul knows—”
 
“You ought to show it to a woman. A man isn't right until a w............