here, where the sons had been killed and the people had sort of adopted him.  He’d quit his uniform and was wearing the clothes of one of the dead sons.  He’d probably have got away with it, if he hadn’t had that wry neck.  Some one saw him in the fields and recognized him and reported him.  I guess nobody cared much but this psychopathic doctor; he wanted to get his pet patient back.  They call him ’the lost American’ here.”

“He seems to be doing some sort of clerical work,” Claude observed discreetly.

“Yes, they say he’s very well educated.  He remembers the books he has read better than his own life.  He can’t recall what his home town looks like, or his home.  And the women are clear wiped out, even the girl he was going to marry.”

Claude smiled.  “Maybe he’s fortunate in that.”

The Doctor turned to him affectionately, “Now Claude, don’t begin to talk like that the minute you land in this country.”

Claude walked on past the church of St. Jacques.  Last night already seemed like a dream, but it haunted him.  He wished he could do something to help that boy; help him get away from the doctor who was writing a book about him, and the girl who wanted him to make the most of himself; get away and be lost altogether in what he had been lucky enough to find.  All day, as Claude came and went, he looked among the crowds for that young face, so compassionate and tender.

IV

Deeper and deeper into flowery France!  That was the sentence Claude kept saying over to himself to the jolt of the wheels, as the long troop train went southward, on the second day after he and his company had left the port of debarkation.  Fields of wheat, fields of oats, fields of rye; all the low hills and rolling uplands clad with harvest.  And everywhere, in the grass, in the yellowing grain, along the road-bed, the poppies spilling and streaming.  On the second day the boys were still calling to each other about the poppies; nothing else had so entirely surpassed their expectations.  They had supposed that poppies grew only on battle fields, or in the brains of war correspondents.  Nobody knew what the cornflowers were, except Willy Katz, an Austrian boy from the Omaha packing-houses, and he knew only an objectionable name for them, so he offered no information.  For a long time they thought the red clover blossoms were wild flowers,—­they were as big as wild roses.  When they passed the first alfalfa field, the whole train rang with laughter; alfalfa was one thing, they believed, that had never been heard of outside their own prairie states.