The highroad became the village street, and then, at the edge of the wood, became a country road again.  A little farther on, where the shade grew denser, it split up into three wagon trails, two of them faint and little used.  One of these Claude followed.  The rain had dwindled to a steady patter, but the tall brakes growing up in the path splashed him to the middle, and his feet sank in spongy, mossy earth.  The light about him, the very air, was green.  The trunks of the trees were overgrown with a soft green moss, like mould.  He was wondering whether this forest was not always a damp, gloomy place, when suddenly the sun broke through and shattered the whole wood with gold.  He had never seen anything like the quivering emerald of the moss, the silky green of the dripping beech tops.  Everything woke up; rabbits ran across the path, birds began to sing, and all at once the brakes were full of whirring insects.

The winding path turned again, and came out abruptly on a hillside, above an open glade piled with grey boulders.  On the opposite rise of ground stood a grove of pines, with bare, red stems.  The light, around and under them, was red like a rosy sunset.  Nearly all the stems divided about half-way up into two great arms, which came together again at the top, like the pictures of old Grecian lyres.

Down in the grassy glade, among the piles of flint boulders, little white birches shook out their shining leaves in the lightly moving air.  All about the rocks were patches of purple heath; it ran up into the crevices between them like fire.  On one of these bald rocks sat Lieutenant Gerhardt, hatless, in an attitude of fatigue or of deep dejection, his hands clasped about his knees, his bronze hair ruddy in the sun.  After watching him for a few minutes, Claude descended the slope, swishing the tall ferns.

“Will I be in the way?” he asked as he stopped at the foot of the rocks.

“Oh, no!” said the other, moving a little and unclasping his hand.

Claude sat down on a boulder.  “Is this heather?” he asked.  “I thought I recognized it, from ‘Kidnapped.’  This part of the world is not as new to you as it is to me.”

“No.  I lived in Paris for several years when I was a student.”

“What were you studying?”

“The violin.”

“You are a musician?” Claude looked at him wonderingly.

“I was,” replied the other with a disdainful smile, languidly stretching out his legs in the heather.

“That seems too bad,” Claude remarked gravely.

“What does?”

“Why, to take fellows with a special talent.  There are enough of us who haven’t any.”

Gerhardt rolled over on his back and put his hands under his head.  “Oh, this affair is too big for exceptions; it’s universal.  If you happened to be born twenty-six years ago, you couldn’t escape.  If this war didn’t kill you in one way, it would in another.”  He told Claude he had trained at Camp Dix, and had come over eight months ago in a regimental band, but he hated the work he had to do and got transferred to the infantry.