"The noble art of war, so sportsmanlike!" she exclaimed. "So like the rules and ideals of the Olympic games! But the games will not serve to keep nations virile. They must shed blood!"

"Sportsmanlike? Not in the least!" he said. "The sport and glamour of war are past. The army becomes a business, a trade that ought to be uniformed in blue jumpers rather than gold lace. We are in an era of enormous forces, untried tactics, and rapidly changing conditions. This is why the big nations hesitate to make war; why they prepare well; why the stake is so great that the smallest detail must not be overlooked."

She could not hold back her arguments, reason was so unquestionably on her side.

"Yes, the cunning of the fox, the brutality of Cain, using modern science and invention! Feint and draw your enemy into a cul-de-sac; screen your flank attacks; mask your batteries and hold their fire till the infantry charge is ripe for decimation! Oh, I have been brought up among soldiers! I know!"

"The rest of Feller's part you have guessed already," he concluded. "You can see how a deaf, inoffensive old gardener would hardly seem to know a Gray soldier from a Brown; how it might no more occur to Westerling to send him away than the family dog or cat; how he might retain his quarters in the tower; how he could judge the atmosphere of the staff, whether elated or depressed, pick up scraps of conversation, and, as a trained officer, know the value of what he heard and report it over the 'phone to Partow's headquarters."

"But what about the aeroplanes?" she asked. "I thought you were to depend on them for scouting."

"We shall use them, but they are the least tried of all the new resources," he said. "A Gray aeroplane may cut a Brown aeroplane down before it returns with the news we want. At most, when the aviator may descend low enough for accurate observation he can see only what is actually being done. Feller would know Westerling's plans before they were even in the first steps of execution. This"—playing the thought happily—"this would be the ideal arrangement, while our planes and dirigibles were kept over our lines to strike down theirs. And, Marta, that is all," he concluded. "I've tried to make everything clear."

"You have, quite!" Marta replied decisively. "Now it is my turn to talk."

"You have been talking a little already!" he intimated good-naturedly.

"Only interruptions. That's not really talking," she answered, and broke into a sharp little laugh. A laugh was helpful to both after such a taut colloquy, but it seemed only to renew her energies for conflict. "If there is war, the moment that Feller's ruse is discovered he will be shot as a spy?" she asked.

"I warned him of that," said Lanstron. "I made the situation plain. He refused the assignments I first suggested to him. He objected that they did not offer any real expiation; they were not difficult or hazardous enough. I saw that I could not trick his conscience—what a conscience old Gustave has!—by any nominal task. When I mentioned this one he was instantly keen. The deafness was his idea of a ruse for his purpose. He wanted his secret kept. Thinking that his weakness for change would not let him bear the monotony of a gardener's life as he saw himself bearing it in imagination, I recommended him to you. And there was the chance—the thousandth chance, Marta! He is a soldier, with a soldier's fatalism. He sees no more danger in this than in commanding a battery in a crisis."

"Naturally, as he is all impulse and fire. But you are the tempered steel of self-control. You should save him from his impulses, not make use of them."

"You put it bluntly, Marta. You—"

"My turn to talk!" she reminded him. "Did you of all her views of Feller from his entrance to his quarters till he had gone. Her lips, which had kept so firm in argument, were parted and trembling in sympathy.

"I can see how he would take it!" she exclaimed. "I see his white hair, his eyes, his fingers trembling on the edge of the table, his utter dejection—and then impulse, headlong, irresponsible, craving the devil's company!"

"Yes, nothing could hold him," Lanstron agreed. "What makes it worse is that with regular living, the pleasure of the garden, and a settled purpose I have noticed his improvement already!"

"There is something so fine about him, something that deserves to win out against his weaknesses," she said reflectively.

"If there is no war, I hope—after a year or so, I hope and believe that I may have him rewarded in some way that would make him feel that he had atoned."

"And we have been talking as if war were due to-morrow!" she exclaimed. The breaking light of a discovery, followed by a wave of happy relief, swept over her responsive features, from relaxing brows to chin, which gave a toss on its own account. "Why, of course, Lanny! Till war does come he is only a gardener with an illusion that is giving mental strength. Why didn't you put it that way before?" she asked in surprise at so easy a solution having escaped them. "Let him stay, at least until war comes."

"And then?"

"Lanny, you yourself, with all your information, you don't think—"

"No; though we are nearer it than ever before, it seems to me," he said, choosing his words carefully. "But it is likely that diplomacy will find its way out of this crisis as it has out of many others."

"Then we'll leave that question till the evil day," she replied. "We have had a terrific argument, Lanny, haven't we? And you have won!"

Her fingers flew out to his arm and rested lightly there after an instant's firm pressure, as was her wont after an argument and they sheathed their blades. Their comradeship seemed to be restored in all its old glory of freedom from petty restraint. He was sure of one thing: that she would let her fingers remain on no other man's sleeve in this fashion; and he hoped that she would let them remain there a long time. Very foolish he was about her, very foolish for a piece of human machinery driven by the dynamo of a human will.

"I have an impression that your goodness of heart has won," he suggested gently.

"Or rather let us say that Feller has won."

"Better still, yes, Feller has won!" he agreed. "Oh, it is good, good, good to be here with you, Marta, away from the grind for a little while," he was saying, in the fulness of his anticipation of the hours they should have together before he had to go, when they heard the sound of steps. He looked around to see an orderly from the nearest military wireless station.

"I was told it was urgent, sir," said the orderly, in excuse for his intrusion, as he passed a telegram to Lanstron.

Immediately Lanstron felt the touch of the paper his features seemed to take on a mask that concealed his thought as he read:

"Take night express. Come direct from station to me. Partow."

This meant that he would be expected at Partow's office at eight the next morning. He wrote his answer; the orderly saluted and departed at a rapid pace; and then, as a matter of habit of the same kind that makes some men wipe their pens when laying them down, he struck a match and set fire to one corner of the paper, which burned to his fingers' ends before he tossed the charred remains away. Marta imagined what he would be like with the havoc of war raging around him—all self-possession and mastery; but actually he was trying to reassure himself that he ought not to feel petulant over a holiday cut short.

"I shall have to go at once," he said. "Marta, if there were to be war very soon—within a week or two weeks—what would be your attitude about Feller's remaining?"

"To carry out his plan, you mean?"

"Yes."

There was a perceptible pause on her part.

"Let him stay," she answered. "I shall have time to decide even after war begins."

"But instantly war begins you must go!" he declared urgently.

"You forget a precedent," she reminded him. "The Galland women have never deserted the Galland house!"

"I know the precedent. But this time the house will be in the thick of the fighting."

"It has been in the thick of the fighting before," she said, with a gesture of impatience.

"Not this kind of fighting, Marta," he proceeded very soberly. "Other wars are no criterion for this. I know about the defences of the tangent because I helped to plan them. In order to keep the enemy in ignorance we have made no permanent fortifications. But the engineers and the material will be ready, instantly the frontier is closed to intelligence, to construct defences suited to a delaying and punishing action. Every human being will be subject to martial law; every resource at military command. Every hill, house, ditch, and tree will be used as cover or protection and will be subject to attack."

Not argument this, but the marshalling of facts of the kind in which he dealt as unanswerable evidence, while she listened with a still face and dilating eyes that did not look at him until he had finished. Then a smile came, a faint, drawn smile of irony, and her eyes staring into his were chilling and greenish-black in their anger.

"And the house of a friend meant nothing! It was only fuel for the hell you devise!" she said, making each word count like shot singing over glare ice.

"It is only fair to myself to say that when I laid the sheets of my map before Partow I had excluded your house and grounds," he pleaded in defence. "His thumb pounced on that telltale blank space. 'A key-point! So this is your tendon of Achilles, eh?' he said in his blunt fashion."

"The blunt fashion is admired by soldiers," she replied without softening. "Yes, he could play chess with heaps of bodies! He is worse than Westerling!"

"No, he would use his own premises, his brother's, his father's if it would help. Well, then he took a pen and filled in the blank space with the detail which is to make your house and garden the centre of an inferno."

"How Christian!" breathed Marta. "I suppose he loves his grandchildren and that they are taught the Lord's prayer!"

"I believe his only pastime is playing with them," admitted Lanstron, stumbling on, trying to be loyal to Partow, to duty, to country, no longer calm or dispassionate, but demoralized under the lash. "He tells them that when they are grown he hopes there will be an end of war."

"Worse yet—a hypocrite!"

"But, Marta, I never knew a man more sincere. He is working to the same end as you—peace. If the Grays would play with fire he would give them such a burning that they will never try again. He would make war too horrible for practice; fix the frontier forever where by, right it belongs; make conquest by one civilized nation of another impossible hereafter. Yes, when it is stalemate, when it is proved that the science of modern defence has made the weak so strong that superior numbers cannot play the bully, then shall we have peace in practice!"

"My children's prayer and Partow in the same gallery!" she laughed stonily. "The peace of armament, not of man's superiority to the tiger and the tarantula! And you say it all so calmly. You picture the hell of your manufacture as coolly as if it were some fairies' dance!"

"Should I be enthusiastic? Should I view the prospect with an old-fashioned Hussar's hurrah?" he asked. "The right way is without illusions. Let us lose our heads, cry out for glory—and then chaos!"

"The heedless barbarism of ignorance intoxicated with primitive passion versus calculating, refined, intellectual, comprehending barbarism! I see no choice," she concluded, rising slowly in the utter weariness of spirit that calls for the end of an interview.

"Marta, you will promise not to remain at the house?" he urged.

"Isn't that my affair?" she asked. "Aren't you willing to leave even that to me after all you have been telling how you are to make a redoubt of our lawn, inviting the shells of the enemy into our drawing-room?"

What could he say in face of a hostility so resolute and armed with the conviction of its logic? Only call up from the depths the two passions of his life in an outburst, with all the force of his nature in play.

"I love this soil, my country's soil, ours by right—-and I love you! I would be true to both!"

"Love! What mockery to mention that now!" she cried chokingly. "It's monstrous!"

"I—I—" He was making an effort to keep his nerves under control.

This time the stiffening elbow failed. With a lurching abruptness he swung his right hand around and seized the wrist of that trembling, injured hand that would not be still. She could not fail to notice the movement, and the sight was a magic that struck anger out of her.

"Lanny, I am hurting you!" she cried miserably.

"A little," he said, will finally dominant over its servant, and he was smiling as when, half stunned and in agony—and ashamed of the fact—he had risen from the debris of cloth and twisted braces. "It's all right," he concluded.

She threw back her arms, her head raised, with a certain abandon as if she would bare her heart.

"Lanny, there have been moments when I would have liked to fly to your arms. There have been moments when I have had the call that comes to every woman in answer to a desire. Yet I was not ready. When I really go it must be in a flame, in answer to your flame!"

"You mean—I—."

But if the flame were about to burst forth she smothered it in the spark.

"And all this has upset me," she went on incoherently. "We've both been cruel without meaning to be, and we're in the shadow of a nightmare; and next time you come perhaps all the war talk will be over and—oh, this is enough for to-day!"

She turned quickly in veritable flight and hurried toward the house. At the bend of the path she wheeled and stood facing him, a hand tossed up and opening and closing as if she had caught a shaft of sunshine and let it go again. Thus she would wave to him from the veranda as he came up the terrace steps. Indelible to him this picture, radiant of a versatile, impressionable vitality, of capacities yet unsounded, of a downright sincerity of impulses, faiths, and ideals which might buffet her this way and that over a strange course. A woman unafraid of destiny; a woman too objective yet to know herself!

"If it ever comes," she called, "I'll let you know! I'll fly to you in a chariot of fire bearing my flame—I am that bold, that brazen, that reckless! For I am not an old maid yet. They've moved the age limit up to thirty. But you can't drill love into me as you drill discipline into armies—no, no more than I can argue peace into armies!"

For a while, motionless, Lanstron watched the point where she had disappeared.

"If I had only been a bridge-builder or an engine-driver," he thought; "anything except this beastly—"

But he was wool-gathering again. He pulled himself together and started at a rapid pace for the tower, where he found Feller sitting by the table, one leg over the other easily, engaged in the prosaic business of sewing a button on his blouse. Lanstron rapped; no answer. He beat a tattoo on the casing; no answer.

"Gustave!" he called; no answer.

Now he entered and touched Feller's shoulder.

"Hello, Lanny!" exclaimed Feller, rising and setting a chair and breaking into a stream of talk. "That's the way they all have to do when they want to attract my attention. I heard your voice and Miss Galland's—having an argument in the garden, I should say. Then I heard your step. Since I became deaf my sense of hearing has really grown keener, just as the blind develop a keener sense of feeling. Eh? eh?" He cupped his hand over his ear in the unctuous enjoyment of his gift of acting. "Yes, Colonel Lanstron, would you like to know what a perfect triumph we're going to pull off in irises next season—but, Lanny, you seem in a hurry!"

"Gustave, I am ordered to headquarters by the night express and I came to tell you that I think it means war."

"War! war!" Feller shouted. "Ye gods and little fishes!" In riotous glee he seized a chair and flung it across the room. "Ye salty, whiskery gods and ye shiny-eyed little fishes! War, do you hear that, you plebeian trousers of the deaf gardener? War!" Flinging the trousers after the chair, he executed a few steps. When he had thus tempered his elation, he grasped Lanstron's arm and, looking into his eyes with feverish resolution and hope, said: "Oh, don't fear! I'll pull it off. And then I shall have paid back—yes, paid back! I shall be a man who can look men in the face again. I need not slink to the other side of the street when I see an old friend coming for fear that he will recognize me. Yes, I could even dare to love a woman of my own world! And—and perhaps the uniform and the guns once more!"

"You may be sure of that. Partow cannot refuse," said Lanstron, deeply affected. After a pause he added: "But I must tell you, Gustave, that Miss Galland, though she is willing that you remain as a gardener, has not yet consented to our plan. She will make no decision until war comes. Perhaps she will refuse. It is only fair that you should know this."

For an instant Feller was downcast; then confidence returned at high pitch.

"Trust me!" he said. "I shall persuade her!"

"I hope you can. It is a chance that might turn the scales of victory—a chance that hangs in my mind stubbornly, as if there were some fate in it. Luck, old boy!"

"Luck to you, Lanny! Luck and promotion!"

They threw their arms about each other in a vigorous embrace.

"And you will keep watch that Mrs. Galland and Marta are in no danger?"

"Trust me for that, too!"

"Then, good-by till I hear from you over the 'phone or I return to see you after the crisis is over!" concluded Lanstron as he hurried away.



XIII

BREAKING A PAPER-KNIFE

Hedworth Westerling would have said twenty to one if he had been asked the odds against war when he was parting from Marta Galland in the hotel reception-room. Before he reached home he would have changed them to ten to one. A scare bulletin about the Bodlapoo affair compelling attention as his car halted to let the traffic of a cross street pass, he bought a newspaper thrust in at the car window that contained the answer of the government of the Browns to a despatch of the Grays about the dispute that had arisen in the distant African jungle. This he had already read two days previously, by courtesy of the premier. It was moderate in tone, as became a power that had three million soldiers against its opponent's five; nevertheless, it firmly pointed out that the territory of the Browns had been overtly invaded, on the pretext of securing a deserter who had escaped across the line, by Gray colonial troops who had raised the Gray flag in place of the Brown flag and remained defiantly in occupation of the outpost they had taken.

As yet, the Browns had not attempted to repel the aggressor by arms for fear of complications, but were relying on the Gray government to order a withdrawal of the Gray force and the repudiation of a commander who had been guilty of so grave an international affront. The surprising and illuminating thing to Westerling was the inspired statement to the press from the Gray Foreign Office, adroitly appealing to Gray chauvinism and justifying the "intrepidity" of the Gray commander in response to so-called "pin-pricking" exasperations.

At the door of his apartment, Francois, his valet and factotum, gave Westerling a letter.

"Important, sir," said Francois.

Westerling knew by a glance that it was, for it was addressed and marked "Personal" in the premier's own handwriting. A conference for ten that evening was requested in a manner that left no doubt of its urgency.

"Let me see, do I dine at the Countess Zalinski's to-night?" asked Westerling. Both Francois and his personal aide kept a list of his appointments.

"Not to-night, sir. To-night you—" said Francois.

"Good!" thought Westerling. "No excuses will be necessary to Marie in order to be at the premier's by ten."

Curiosity made him a little ahead of time, but he found the premier awaiting him in his study, free from interruption or eavesdropping.

In the shadow of the table lamp the old premier looked his years. His definite features were easy material for the caricaturist, who does not deal in halftones. A near view of them was not attractive. They had the largeness which impresses the gallery from the floor of a parliamentary chamber, where delicate lines of sensibility and character lack the quality which the actor supplies with his make-up. As is often the case with elderly statesmen, his face seemed like that of the crowd done boldly as a single face, while his shrewd eyes in a bed of crow's-feet, when they lighted to their purpose in confidence, expressed his understanding of the crowd and its thoughts and how it may be led.

From youth he had been in politics, ever a bold figure and a daring player, but now beginning to feel the pressure of younger men's elbows. Fonder even of power, which had become a habit, than in his twenties, he saw it slipping from his grasp at an age when the 'downfall of his government meant that he should never hold the reins again. He had been called an ambitious demagogue and a makeshift opportunist by his enemies, but the crowd liked him for his ready strategy, his genius for appealing phrases, and for the gambler's virtue which hitherto had made him a good loser.

"You saw our communique to-night that went with the publication of the Browns' despatch?" he remarked.

"Yes, and I was glad that I had been careful to send a spirited commander to that region," Westerling replied.

"So you guess my intention, I see." The premier smiled. He picked up a long, thin ivory paper-knife and softly patted the palm of his hand with it. "We have had many discussions, you and I, Westerling," he said. "But to-night I'm going to ask categorical questions. They may take us over old ground, but they are the questions of the nation to the army."

"Certainly!" Westerling replied in his ready, confident manner.

"We hear a great deal about the precision and power of modern arms as favoring the defensive," said the premier. "I have read somewhere that it will enable the Browns to hold us back, despite our advantage of numbers. Also, that they can completely man every part of their frontier and that their ability to move their reserves rapidly, thanks to modern facilities, makes a powerful flanking attack in surprise out of the question."

"Some half-truths in that," answered Westerling. "One axiom, that must hold good through all time, is that the aggressive which keeps at it always wins. We take the aggressive. In the space where Napoleon deployed a division, we deploy a battalion to-day. The precision and power of modern arms require this. With such immense forces and present-day tactics, the line of battle will practically cover the length of the frontier. Along their range the Browns have a series of fortresses commanding natural openings for our attack. These are almost impregnable. But there are pregnable points between them. Here, our method will be the same that the Japanese followed and that they learned from European armies. We shall concentrate in masses and throw in wave after wave of attack until we have gained the positions we desire. Once we have a tenable foothold on the crest of the range the Brown army must fall back and the rest will be a matter of skilful pursuit."

The premier, as he listened, rolled the paper-knife over and over, regarding its polished sides, which were like Westerling's manner of facile statement of a programme certain of fulfilment.

"We can win, then? We can go to their capital, or far enough to force a great indemnity, the annexation of one of their provinces, perhaps, and the taking over of their African colonies, which we can develop so much better than they?"

Westerling took care to show none of the eagerness which had set his pulses humming.

"To their capital!" he declared decisively. "Nothing less. For that I have planned."

"And the cost in lives?"

"Five or six hundred thousand casualties, which means about a hundred thousand killed."

"Ghastly! The population of a good-sized city!" exclaimed the premier.

"A small percentage out of five million soldiers; a smaller out of eighty million population," Westerling returned.

"And how long do you think the war would last? How long the strain on our finances, the suspense to the markets?"

"About a month. We shall go swiftly. The completeness of modern preparation must make a war of to-day brief between two great powers. We must win with a rush, giving the defenders no breathing spell, pouring masses after masses upon the critical positions."

"How long will it take to mobilize?"

"Less than a week after the railroads are put entirely at our service, with three preceding days of scattered movements," answered Westerling. "Deliberate mobilizations are all right for a diplomatic threat that creates a furore in the newspapers and a depression in the stock-market, but which is not to be carried out. When you mean war, all speed and the war fever at white heat."

"Therefore, there would be little time for the public to hoard money or to provoke a panic. The government, knowing precisely what was before it, could take severe preventive measures."

"But I may say that we should strike before mobilization is complete. A day will be required to take the La Tir tangent and other outlying positions. The 128th and other regiments who will do this work are already at the front. They were chosen because they came from distant provinces and we can count on their patriotic fervor for brilliant and speedy action, with resulting general enthusiasm for the whole army, which will be up in time for the assault on the Browns' permanent defences."

"You would have made a good politician, Westerling," the premier remarked, with a twitching uplift of the brows and a knowing gleam in his shrewd old eyes.

"Thank you," replied Westerling, appearing flattered, though secretly annoyed that any one should think that a chief of staff could care to change places with any man in the world. Governments might come and go, but the army was the rock in the midst of the play of minor forces, the ultimate head of order and power. "A man who is able to lead in anything must be something of a politician," he said suavely.

"Very true, indeed. Perhaps I had that partly in mind in making you vice-chief of staff," responded the premier enjoyably. "You spoke of the war fever at white heat," he went on, returning to his muttons, "and of the army's enthusiasm for its work. There we come to the kernel in the nut, eh?" he asked, as he prodded the paper-knife into the palm of his hand.

"Drill, organization, discipline, and centralized authority and a high-spirited aristocracy of officers are most important," said Westerling. "But after that come morale and the psychology of the soldier." There he shrugged slightly, in indication of a resentment at the handicap of human nature in his work. "The business of a soldier is to risk death in the way he is told. The keener he is for his cause the better. An ideal soldier is he who does not think for himself, but observes every detail of training and will not stop until halted by orders or a bullet. Therefore we want the army hot with desire. The officers of a company cannot force their men forward. Without insubordination or mutiny the men may stop from lack of interest after only a very small percentage of loss."

"Lack of interest!" mused the premier. But Westerling, preoccupied with the literal exposition of his subject, did not catch the flash of passing satire before the premier, his features growing hard and challenging, spoke in another strain: "Then it all goes back to the public—to that enormous body of humanity out there!" He swung the paper-knife around with outstretched arm toward the walls of the room. "To public opinion—as does everything else in this age—to the people! I have seen them pressing close, about to remove me from power, and I have started a diversion which made them forget the object of their displeasure. I have thought them won one day, and the next I realized that they were going against me. Thank Heaven for the brevity of their memory, or we leaders would be hung high by our own inconsistencies! He who leads sees which way they will go, rushes to the head of the procession, discovers them to themselves and turns a corner and they follow, thinking that they are going straight to the point. But always they are there, never older, never younger, never tiring—there, smiling or scowling or forgetting all about you, only to have a sudden fierce reminder overnight to surprise you—and our masters, yours and mine! For no man can stand against them when they say no or yes."

"You know the keys to play on, though," remarked Westerling with a complimentary smile. "No one knows quite so well."

"I ought to," replied the premier. "That was the purpose of the semi-official communique about Bodlapoo, which, of course, we can repudiate later, if need be. I saw that the brilliant forced march of our commander had excited popular enthusiasm. It does not matter if he were in the wrong. Will race feeling rise to the pitch of war from this touchstone with the proper urging? Of course, the impulse must come from the people themselves. We must seem to resist it, the better to arouse it." He bent the paper-knife into a bow with fingers that were rigid. "Times are hard, factions are bitter, our cabinet is in danger, with economic and political chaos from overpopulation in sight," he continued. "We hunger for land, for fresh opportunities for development. An outburst of patriotism, concentrating every thought of the nation on war!—is that the way out?"

Westerling had only answered questions so far. Here was his cue for argument.

"We were never so ready," he said. "War must come some time. We should choose the moment, not leave it to chance. The nation needs war as a stimulant, as a corrective, as a physician. We grow stale; we think of our domestic troubles. The old racial passions are weakening and with them our virility. Victory will make room for millions in the place of the thousands who fall. The indemnity will bring prosperity. Because we have had no war, because the long peace has been abnormal, is the reason you have all this agitation and all these strikes. They will be at an end. Those who are fit to rule will be in power."

"And you are sure—sure we can win?" the premier asked with a long, tense look at Westerling, who was steady under the scrutiny.

"Absolutely!" he answered. "Five millions against three! It's mathematics, or our courage and skill are not equal to theirs Absolutely! We have the power, why not use it? We do not live in a dream age!"

The premier sank deeper in his chair. He was silent, thinking. He who had carried off so many great coups with rare ease was on the threshold of one that made them all seem petty. He had heard random talk that some of the officers of the staff considered Westerling to be lath painted to look like steel. There was a reported remark by Turcas, his assistant, implying that the ability to achieve a position did not mean the ability to fill it. Jealousy, no doubt; the jealousy of rivals! The premier himself was used to having members of his own cabinet ever on the watch for the vulnerable spot in his back, which he had never allowed them to find. Yet, there was the case of Louis Napoleon. He had the ability to achieve a position; he had been the lath painted to look like steel. He had all the externals which the layman associates with victory until he went to the supreme test, which ripped him into slivers of rotten wood. The little Napoleon had been one of the premier's favorite bugaboo examples of stage realism tried out in real life. But it was ridiculous to compare him with the stalwart figure sitting across the table, who had spoken the language of materialism without illusion.

Westerling's ambition on edge communicated itself to the premier, whose soft hands, long since divorced from any labor except official hand-shaking and the exercise of authority, were bending the paper-knife with unconscious vigor.

"All the achievements of power form only a dull background for victory in war to a people's imagination!" he exclaimed. "Your name and mine to symbolize an age! What power for us! What power for the nation!"

From a sudden, unwitting exertion of his strength the knife which had been the recipient of his emotions snapped in two. Rather carefully he laid the pieces on the table before he rose and turned to Westerling, his decision made.

"If the people respond with the war fever, then it is war!" he said. "I take you at your word that you will win!"

Westerling's chair creaked with the tense drawing of his muscles in the impulse of delight. He had gained the great purpose; but there was another and vital one on his programme.

"A condition!" he announced. "From the moment war begins the army is master of all intelligence, all communication, all resources. Everything we require goes into the crucible!"

"And the press—the mischievous, greedy, but very useful press?" asked the premier.

"It also shall serve; also obey. No lists of killed and wounded shall be given out until I am ready. The public must know nothing except what I choose to tell. I act for the people and the nation."

"That is agreed," said the premier. "For these terrible weeks every nerve and muscle of the nation is at your service to win for the nation. In three or four days I shall know if the public rises to the call. If not—" He shook his head.

"While all the information given out is provocative to our people, you will declare your hope that war may be averted," Westerling continued. "This will screen our purpose. Finally, on top of public enthusiasm will come the word that the Browns have fired the first shot—as they must when we cross the frontier—that they have been killing our soldiers. This will make the racial spirit of every man respond. Having decided for war, every plan is worthy that helps to victory."

"It seems fiendish!" exclaimed the premier in answer to a thought eddying in the powerful current of his brain. "Fiendish with calculation, but merciful, as you say."

"A fast, terrific campaign! A ready machine taking the road!" Westerling declared. "Less suffering than if we went to war carelessly for a long campaign—than if we allowed sentiment to interfere with intellect."

"I like your energy, your will!" said the premier admiringly. "And about the declaration of war? We shall time that to your purpose."

"Declarations of war before striking, by nations taking the aggressive, are a disadvantage," Westerling explained. "They are going out of practice. Witness the examples of Japan against Russia and the Balkan allies against Turkey. In these days declarations are not necessary as a warning of what is going to happen. They belong to the etiquette of fencers."

"Yes, exactly. The declaration of war and the ambassador's passports will be prepared and the wire that fighting has begun will release them," agreed the premier. "Another thing," he added, "there is the question of the opinion of the world as represented by The Hague and the peace societies. This government has always expressed sympathy with their ideas."

"Naturally," Westerling put in. "We shall use hand-grenades, explosives from dirigibles, every known power of destruction. So will the Browns, you may be sure. In such a cataclysm we shall have no time for niceties. The peace societies will have hardly formulated their protests to The Hague before the war is over. Our answer will be our victory—the power that goes with the prestige of unconquerable force. Victory, nothing but victory counts!"

Westerling was speaking by the book, expressing the ideas that he had again and again rehearsed as a part of the preparation, the eternal preparation for the sudden emergency of war, which is the duty of the staff. So letter-perfect was he in his lines that a layman might have scouted his realization of the enormousness of his responsibility.

"Yet if we did lose! If when I had given you all you ask your plans went wrong! If our army were broken to pieces on the frontier and then the nation, kept in ignorance of events, learned the truth"—the premier enunciated slowly and pointedly while he locked glances with Westerling—"that is the end for us both. You would hardly want to return to the capital to face public wrath!"

"We must win though we lose a million men!" he answered. "I stake my life!" he cried hoarsely, striking his fist on the table.

"You stake your life!" repeated the premier with slow emphasis.

"Bravado hardly becomes a chief of staff. His place is not under fire," Westerling explained. "However, I mean to make my headquarters at La Tir, immediately we have taken it, for the effect of having the leader of the army promptly established on conquered territory."

"I understand that," replied the premier. "But still you stake your life? That is the greatest thing a man has to stake. You stake your life on victory?" he demanded fiercely.

"I do!" said Westerling. "Yes, my life. We cannot fail!"

"Then it will be war, if the people want it!" said the premier. "I shall not resist their desire!" he added in his official manner, at peace with his conscience.



XIV

IN PARTOW'S OFFICE

Partow was a great brain set on an enormous body. Partow's eyes had the fire of youth at sixty-five, but the pendulous flesh of his cheeks was pasty. Partow was picturesque; he was a personality with a dome forehead sweeping back nobly to scattered and contentious, short gray hairs. Jealousy and faction had endeavored for years to remove him from his position at the head of the army on account of age. New governments decided as they came in that he must go, and they went out with him still in the saddle. He worked fourteen hours a day, took no holidays and little exercise, violated the rules of health, and never appeared at gold-braid functions. The business of official display, as he said pungently, he delegated to that specialist, his handsome vice-chief of staff.

He had set up no silhouette of a charging soldier peppered with bullet marks on the wall of his office, for this was a picture that he carried in his mind. Pertinent to his own taste, under the glance of the portraits of the old heroes, was a little statuette of a harvester called Toil on his desk.

"That's the fellow we're defending," he would say, becoming almost rhapsodical. "I like to think back to him. He's the infantry before you put him in uniform."

Let officers apply themselves with conspicuous energy and they heard from a genial Partow; let officers only keep step and free of courts martial, and they heard from a merciless taskmaster. Resign, please, if you like a leisurely life, he told the idlers; and he had a way of making them so uncomfortable that they would take the advice. Among the sons of rest who had retired to mourn over the world going to the devil he was referred to as not being a gentleman, which amused him; some said that he was crazy, which amused him even more.

Peculiarly human, peculiarly dictatorial, dynamic, and inscrutable was Partow, who never asked any one under him to work harder than himself.

Lanstron appeared in the presence of Jove shortly after eight o'clock the next morning after he left La Tir. Jove rolled his big head on his short neck in a nod and said:

"Late!"

"The train was late, sir!"

"And you have disobeyed orders!" grumbled Partow.

"Disobeyed orders? How, sir?"

"And you look me in the eye as you always do! You think that excuses you, perhaps?"

"No, sir. But I am bound to ask what orders?"

"Well, not orders, but my instructions; at least, my desire. Flying yourself—directing a manoeuvre—racing the Grays!"

"You heard about it?"

"I hear about everything! I have told you not to risk your life. Lives are assets of various kinds in an army. It is my business to determine the relative value of those of my subordinates. You are not to sacrifice yours."

"I haven't yet, sir. I have it with me this morning," Lanstron replied, "and I have some news about our thousandth chance."

"Hm-m! What is it?" asked Partow. When Lanstron had told the story, Partow worked his lips in a way he had if he were struck by a passing reflection which might or might not have a connection with the subject in hand. "Strange about her when you consider who her parents were!" he said. "But you never know. His son," nodding to Toil, "might be a great painter or a snob. Miss Galland has an idea—that's something—and character and a brain making arrows so fast that she shoots them into the blue just for mental relief. She's quite a woman. If I were thirty, and single, I believe I'd fall in love with her. But don't you dare tell Mrs. Partow. I want the fun of telling her myself. Hm-m! Why don't you sit down, young man?"

Partow turned his thick, white palm toward a chair, and his smile, now clearly showing that he was not deeply offended with Lanstron's insubordination, had a singular charm. The smile vanished as Lanstron seated himself and in its place came such a look as friend Toil had seen on very rare occasions.

"The way that the Grays gave out our despatch convinces me of their intentions," Partow said. "Their people are rising to it and ours are rising in answer. The Grays have been transferring regiments from distant provinces to their frontier because they will fight better in an invasion. We are transferring home regiments to our frontier because they will fight for their own property. By Thursday you will find that open mobilization on both sides has begun."

"My department is ready," said Lanstron, "all except your decision about press censorship."

"A troublesome point," responded Partow. "I have procrastinated because two definite plans were fully worked out. It is a matter of choice between them: either publicity or complete secrecy. You know I am no believer in riding two horses at once. My mind is about made up; but let me hear your side again. Sometimes I get conviction by probing another mans."

Lanstron was at his best, for his own conviction was intense.

"Of course they will go in for secrecy; but our case is different," he began.

Partow settled himself to listen with the gift of the organizer who draws from his informant the brevity of essentials.

"I should take the people into our confidence," Lanstron proceeded. "I should make them feel that we were one family fighting for all we hold dear against the invader. If our losses are heavy, if we have a setback, then the inspiration of the heroism of those who have fallen and the danger of their own homes feeling the foot of the invader next will impel the living to greater sacrifices. For the Grays are in the wrong. The moral and the legal right is with us."

"And the duty of men like you and me, chosen for the purpose," said Partow, "is worthily to direct the courage that goes with moral right. The overt act of war must come from them by violating our frontier, not in the African jungle but here. Even when the burglar fingers the window-sash we shall not fire—no, not until he enters our house. When he does, you would have a message go out to our people that will set them quivering with indignation?"

"Yes, and I would let the names of our soldiers who fall first be known and how they fell, their backs to their frontier homes and their faces to the foe."

"Our very liberality in giving news will help us to cover the military secrets which we desire to preserve," Partow said, with slow emphasis. "We shall hold back what we please, confident of the people's trust. Good policy that, yes! But enough! Your orders are ready, in detail, I believe. You have nothing to add?"

"No, sir, nothing; at least, not until war begins."

"Very well. We shall have the orders issued at the proper moment," concluded Partow. "And Westerling is going to find," he proceeded after a thoughtful pause, "that a man is readier to die fighting to hold his own threshold than fighting to take another man's. War is not yet solely an affair of machinery and numbers. The human element is still uppermost. I know something, perhaps, that Westerling does not know. I have had an experience that he has not had and that few active officers of either army have had—I have been under fire."

His eyes flashed with the memory of his charge, and visions of the day when Grandfather Fragini was a beau sabreur and Marta Galland's father toasted quick death and speedy promotion seemed to cluster around him.

"Experience plus an old man's honest effort for a mind open to all suggestion and improvements!" he exclaimed. "An open mind that let you have your way in equipping more dirigibles and planes than Westerling guesses we have, eh? And, perhaps, a few more guns! And you, too, have been under fire," he added. "Give me your hand—no, not that one, not the one you shake hands with—the one wounded in action!"

Partow enclosed the stiffened fingers in his own with something of the caress which an old bear that is in very good humor might give to a promising cub.

"I have planned, planned, planned for this time," he said. "I have played politics with statesmen to hold my place in the belief that I was the man for the work which I have done. The world shall soon know, as the elements of it go into the crucible test, whether it is well done or not. I want to live to see the day when the last charge made against our trenches is beaten back. Then they may throw this old body onto the rubbish heap as soon as they please—it is a fat, unwieldy behemoth of an old body!"

"No, no, it isn't!" Lanstron objected hotly. He was seeing only what most people saw after talking with Partow for a few minutes, his fine, intelligent eyes and beautiful forehead.

"All that I wanted of the body was to feed my brain," Partow continued, heedless of the interruption. "I have watched my mind as a navigator watches a barometer. I have been ready at the first sign that it was losing its grip to give up. Yet I have felt that my body would go on feeding my brain and that to the last moment of consciousness, when suddenly the body collapses, I should have self-possession and energy of mind. Under the coming strain the shock may come, as a cord snaps. At that instant my successor will take up my work where I leave it off."

"Goerwitz, you mean." Lanstron referred in unmistakable apprehension to the vice-chief of staff, whom all the army knew had no real ability or decision underneath his pleasing, confident exterior.

"No, not Goerwitz," said Partow, with a shrug. "Some one who will go on with the weaving, not by knotting threads but with the same threads in a smooth fabric." Lanstron felt an increased pressure of the hand, a communicated tingling to his nerves. "I have chosen him. The old fogy who has aimed to join experience to youth chooses youth. You took your medicine without grumbling in the disagreeable but vitally important position of chief of intelligence. Now you—there, don't tremble with stage fright!" For Lanstron's hand was quivering in Partow's grasp, while his face was that of a man stunned.

"But Goerwitz—what will he say?" he gasped.

"Goerwitz goes to a division in reserve."

"And the army! The government! What will they say at such—such a jump for a colonel?"

"The government leaves all to me from the day war begins. I shall transfer others than Goerwitz—others who have had influence with the premier which it was not wise to deny in time of peace."

"Very well, sir," answered Lanstron, with a subordinate's automatic consent to a superior's orders. His words sounded ridiculous in view of his feelings, yet they were more expressive than any florid speech.

"You are to be at the right hand of this old body," continued Partow. "You are to go with me to the front; to sleep in the room next to mine; to be always at my side, and, finally, you are to promise that if ever the old body fails in its duty to the mind, if ever you see that I am not standing up to the strain, you are to say so to me and I give you my word that I shall let you take charge."

Lanstron was too stunned to speak for a moment. The arrangement seemed a hideous joke: a refinement of cruelty inconceivable. It was expecting him to tell Atlas that he was old and to take the weight of the world off the giant's shoulders.

"Have you lost your patriotism?" demanded Partow. "Are you afraid? Afraid to tell me the truth? Afraid of duty? Afraid in your youth of the burden that I bear in age?"

His fingers closed in on Lanstron's with such force that the grip was painful.

"Promise!" he commanded.

"I promise!" Lanstron said with a throb.

"That's it' That's the way! That's the kind of soldier I like," Partow declared with change of tone, and he rose from his chair with a spring that was a delight to Lanstron in its proof of the physical vigor so stoutly denied. "We have a lot to say to each other to-day," he added; "but first I am going to show you the whole bag of tricks."

His arm crooked in Lanstron's, they went along the main corridor of the staff office hung with portraits of generals who had beaten or held their own with the Grays. Passing through a door for which Partow held the key, they were in a dim, narrow passage with bare walls, lighted by two small gas flames. At the end was another, a heavy steel door, of the sort associated with the protection of bonds and securities, but in this case for the security of a nation's defence. Partow turned the knob of the combination back and forth and with the smooth swing of a great weight on noiseless hinges the door opened and they entered a vault having a single chair and a small table in the centre and lined by sections of numbered pigeonholes, each with a combination lock At the base of one section was a small safe. It was not the first time that Lanstron had been in this vault. He had the combination of two of the sections of pigeonholes, aerostatics and intelligence. The rest belonged to other divisions.

"The safe is my own, as you know. No one opens it; no one knows what is in it but me," said Partow, taking from it an envelope and a manuscript, which he laid on the table. "There you have all that, is in my brain—the whole plan. The envelope contains the combinations of all the pigeonholes, if you wish to look up any details."

"Thank you!" Lanstron half whispered. It was all he could think of to say.

"And you will find that there is more than you thought, perhaps: the reason why I have fought hard to remain chief of staff; why—" Partow continued in a voice that had the sepulchral uncanniness of a threat long nursed now breaking free of the bondage of years within the sound-proof walls. "But—" he broke off suddenly as if he distrusted even the security of the vault. "Yes, it is all there—my life's work, my dream, my ambition, my plan!"

Lanstron heard the lock slide in the door as Partow went out and he was alone with the army's secrets. As he read Partow's firm handwriting, many parts fell together, many moves on a chess-board grew clear. His breath came faster, he bent closer over the table, he turned back pages to go over them again. Every sentence dropped home in his mind like a bolt in a socket.

When he had finished the manuscript the trance of his thoughts held him in the same attitude. "Five millions to our three!" a voice kept repeating to him. "In face of that this dream!" another voice was saying. Had it been right to intrust such responsibility to one man of Partow's age and right to transfer that responsibility to himself in an emergency? Yet how clear the plan in the confidence of its wisdom! Unconscious of the passage of time, he did not hear the door open or realize Partow's presence until he felt Partow's hand on his shoulder.

"I see that you didn't look into any of the pigeonholes," the chief of staff observed.

Lanstron pressed his finger-tips on the manuscript significantly.

"No. It is all there!"

"The thing being to carry it out!" said Partow. "God with us!" he added devoutly.



XV

CLOSE TO THE WHITE POSTS

Have you forgotten Hugo Mallin, humorist of Company B of the 128th Regiment of the Grays, whom we left in their barracks under orders for South La Tir on the afternoon that Westerling called on Marta Galland? Have you forgotten Eugene Aronson, the farmer's son, and Jacob Pilzer, the butcher's son, and pasty-faced little Peterkin, the valet's son, and the judge's son, and the other privates of the group that surrounded Hugo Mallin as he aired heresies that set them laughing?

Through the press, an unconscious instrument of his purpose, the astute premier has inoculated them with the virus of militant patriotism. Day by day the crisis has become more acute; day by day the war fever has risen in their veins. Big Eugene Aronson believes everything he reads; his country can do no wrong. Jacob Pilzer is most bellicose; he chafes at inaction, while they all suffer the discomforts of an empty factory building in the rear of South La Tir which has become a temporary barracks.

On Tuesday they hear of crowds around the Foreign Office demanding war, on Wednesday of panics on the stock exchanges, on Thursday of mobilization actually begun and a rigid press censorship established, and on Friday other regiments and guns and horses are detraining and departing right and left. Hurrying officers know nothing except what they have been told to do.

"When do we start? What are we waiting for?" demanded Pilzer. "I want to be in the thick of the fighting and not trailing along with the reserves!" If any one in the 128th wins the bronze cross he means that it shall be he and not Eugene Aronson.

"Never mind, you'll have a chance. There'll be war enough to go around, I am sure!" said Hugo Mallin.

"More than you'll want!" Pilzer shot back, thrusting out his jaw.

"I'm sure of that!" answered Hugo, the mask of his face drawn in quizzical solemnity. "I don't want any at all."

This brought a tremendous laugh. All the laughs had been tremendous since mobilization had begun in earnest, and the atmosphere was like the suspense before a thunder-storm breaks.

On Saturday evening the 128th was mustered in field accoutrements and a full supply of cartridges. In the darkness the first battalion marched out at right angles to the main road that ran through La Tir and South La Tir. At length Company B, deployed in line of skirmishers, lay down to sleep on its arms.

"We wait here for the word," Fracasse, the captain, whispered to his senior lieutenant. "If it comes, our objective is the house and the old castle on the hill above the town."

The tower of the church showed dimly when a pale moon broke through a cloud. By its light Hugo saw on his right Eugene's big features and massive shoulders and on his left the pinched and characterless features of Peterkin. A few yards ahead was a white stone post.

"That's their side over there!" whispered the banker's son, who was next to Peterkin.

"When we cross war begins," said the manufacturer's son.

"I wonder if they are expecting us!" said the judge's son a trifle huskily, in an attempt at humor, though he was not given to humor.

"Just waiting to throw bouquets!" whispered the laborer's son. He, too, was not given to humor and he, too, spoke a trifle huskily.

"And we'll fix bayonets when we start and they will run at the sight of our steel!" said Eugene Aronson. He and Hugo alone, not excepting Pilzer, the butcher's son, spoke in their natural voices. The others were trying to make their voices sound natural, while Pilzer's voice had developed a certain ferocity, and the liver patch on his cheek twitched more frequently. "Why, Company B is in front! We have the post of honor, and maybe our company will win the most glory of any in the regiment!" Eugene added. "Oh, we'll beat them! The bullet is not made that will get me!"

"Your service will be over in time for you to help with the spring planting, Eugene," whispered Hugo, who was apparently preoccupied with many detached thoughts.

"And you to be at home sucking lollipops!" Pilzer growled to Hugo.

"That would be better than murdering my fellowman to get his property," Hugo answered, so soberly that it did not seem to his comrades that he was joking this time. Pilzer's snarling exclamation of "White feather!" came in the midst of a chorus of indignation.

Captain Fracasse, who had heard only the disturbance without knowing the cause, interfered in a low, sharp tone:

"Silence! As I have told you before, silence! We don't want them to know that we are here. Go to sleep! You may get no rest to-morrow night!"

But little Peterkin, the question in his mind breaking free of his lips, unwittingly asked:

"Shall—shall we fight in the morning?"

"I don't know. Nobody knows!" answered Fracasse. "We wait on orders, ready to do our duty. There may be no war. Don't let me hear another peep from you!"

Now all closed their eyes. In front of them was vast silence which seemed to stretch from end to end of the frontier, while to the rear was the rumble of switching railway trains and the rumble of provision trains and artillery on the roads, and in the distance on the plain the headlight of a locomotive cut a swath in the black night. But the breathing of most of the men was not that of slumber, though Eugene and Pilzer slept soundly. Hours passed. Occasional restless movements told of efforts to force sleep by changing position.

"It's the waiting that's sickening!" exploded the manufacturer's son under his breath, desperately.

"So I say. I'd like to be at it and done with the suspense!" said the doctor's son.

"They say if you are shot through the head you don't know what killed you, it's so quick. Think of that!" exclaimed Peterkin, huddling closer to Hugo and shivering.

"Yes, very merciful," Hugo whispered, patting Peterkin's arm.

"Sh-h-h! Silence, I tell you!" commanded Fracasse crossly. He was falling into a half doze at last.



XVI

DELLARME'S MEN GET A MASCOT

And have you forgotten gigantic Private Stransky, born to the red, with the hedgerows of the world his home? Have you forgotten Tom Fragini and the sergeant and the others of Captain Dellarme's men of the 53d of the Browns, whom we left marching along the road to La Tir, with old Grandfather Fragini, veteran of the Hussars, in his faded uniform coat with his medal on his breast, keeping step, hep-hep-hep?

Grandfather Fragini has attached himself to the regiment while it rests in barracks a few hours' march from the frontier. He is accepted as the mascot of the company in which both his grandson and Stransky are serving. But he never speaks to Stransky and refers to him in the third person as "that traitor," which makes Stransky grin sardonically. Each day's developments bring more color to his cheeks; his rheumatic old legs are limbering with the elixir of rising patriotism, though Tom and his comrades are singularly without enthusiasm, according to grandfather's idea. They lead the newspapers gluttonously and they welcome each item that promises a peaceful solution of the crisis.

Inwardly, Grandfather Fragini is worried about the state of the army. Is his race becoming decadent? Or, as he puts it, are the younger generation without sand in their craws? When he came into the barracks yard swinging his cap aloft and shouting the news that mobilization had begun there was not even a cheer.

"I suppose it means war," said Tom Fragini with a soberness that was in keeping with the grave faces of his fellows. Stransky sitting at one side by himself smiled.

"Well, you'd think it was a funeral!" grandfather exclaimed in disgust.

"There will be lots of funerals!" said Tom.

"I s'pose there will be; but if you get that in your mind how can you fight?" grandfather demanded. "Why, if any Hussar had spoken of funerals we'd called him white-livered, that's what we would! We cheered till we was hoarse; we danced and hugged one another; we rattled our sabres in our scabbards; we sang rip-roaring death-or-glory songs. When you're going to war you want to sing and shout. That's the way to keep your spirits up."

"Let's sing 'Ring-around-the-rosy' to please the old gentleman. Come on!" suggested Stransky.

"I don't see that we are after either death or glory," said Tom. "We are going to do our duty."

The impulse of enthusiasm seemed equally lacking in the others. Stransky grinned and his deep-set eyes turned inward with a squint of knowing satisfaction at the bony bridge of his nose.

"I'm not wanting any traitor to start any songs for me!" declared grandfather.

"Never mind. The fellows on the other side aren't any more enthusiastic than we are, grandfather," Stransky said soothingly, in his mocking way. "The fact is, we don't want to kill our brothers across the frontier and they don't want to kill us or be killed. It's only the ruling classes that want the proletariat to—"

"Fire away, Stransky! It's hours since you made a speech!" chirruped a voice.

"Look out, Bert, the sergeant's coming!" another voice warned the orator.

The state of mind of the 53d was that of all the regiments of the Browns with their faces toward the white posts, quiet, thoughtful, and grave; for they had not to arouse ardor for the aggressive. As they were to receive rather than give blows they might be more honest with themselves than the men of the Grays.

In marching order, with cartridge-boxes full, on Saturday night the 53d marched out to the main pass road. When Grandfather Fragini found that he had been ordered to remain behind he sought the colonel.

"I've got reasons! Let me come!" he pleaded.

"No. It is no place for you."

"I can keep up! I can keep up! I feel like a boy!"

"But it is different these days, and this is the infantry. The bullets carry far. You will not know how to take cover," the colonel explained.

"Well, if I am killed I won't be losing much time on this earth," grandfather observed with cool logic. "But that ain't it. I'm worried about Tom. I'm afraid he ain't going to fight! I—I want to stiffen him up!"

"He will fight, all right. Sorry, but it is out of the question," said the colonel, turning away.

Grandfather buried his face in his hands and shook with the sobs of second childhood until an idea occurred to him. Wasn't he a free man? Hadn't he as much right as anybody to use the public highway? Drying his eyes, he set out along the road in the wake of the regiment.

One company after another left the road at a given point, bound for the position mapped in its instructions Dellarme's, however, went on until it was opposite the Galland house.

"We are depending on you," the colonel said to Dellarme, giving his hand a grip. "You are not to draw off till you get the flag."

"No, sir," Dellarme replied.

"Mind the signal to the batteries—keep the men screened—warn them not to let their first baptism of shell fire shake their nerves!" the colonel added in a final repetition of instructions already indelibly impressed on the captain's mind.

Moving cautiously through a cut, Dellarme's company came, about midnight, to a halt among the stubble of a wheat-field behind a knoll. After he had bidden the men to break ranks, he crept up the incline.

"Yes, it's there!" he whispered when he returned. "On the crest of the knoll a cord is stretched from stake to stake," he said, explaining the reason for what was to be done, as was his custom. "The engineers placed it there after dusk and the frontier was closed, so that you would know just where to use your spades in the dark. Quietly as possible! No talking!" he kept cautioning as the men turned the soft earth, "and not higher than the cord, and lay the stubble side of the sods on the reverse so as to cover the fresh earth on the sky-line."

When the work was done all returned behind the knoll except the sentries posted at intervals on the crest to watch. With the aid of a small electric flash, screened by his hands, Dellarme again examined a section of the staff map that outlined the contour of the knoll in relation to the other positions. After this he wrote in his diary the simple facts of the day's events, concluding with a sentiment of gratitude for the honor shown to his company and a prayer that he might keep a clear head and do his duty if war came on the morrow.

"Now, every one get all the sleep he can!" he advised the men.

Stransky slept, with his head on his arm, as soundly as Eugene Aronson, his antithesis in character; the others slept no better than the men of the 128th. The night passed without any alarm except that of their own thoughts, and they welcomed dawn as a relief from suspense. There was no hot coffee this morning, and they washed down their rations with water from their canteens. The old sergeant was lying beside Captain Dellarme on the crest, the sunrise in their faces. As the mist cleared from the plain it revealed the white dots of the frontier posts in the meadow and behind them many gray figures in skirmish order, scarcely visible except through the glasses.

"It looks like business!" declared the old sergeant.

"Yes, it begins the minute they cross the line!" said Dellarme.

His glance sweeping to the rear to scan the landscape under the light of day, he recognized, with a sense of pride and awe, the tactical importance of his company's position in relation to that of the other companies. Easily he made out the regimental line by streaks of concealed trenches and groups of brown uniforms; and here and there were the oblong, cloth stretches of waiting hospital litters. On the reverse slope of another knoll was the farmhouse, marked X on his map as the regimental headquarters, where he was to watch for the signal to fall back from his first stand in delaying the enemy's advance. Directly to the rear was the cut through which the company had come from the main pass road, and beyond that the Galland house, which was to be the second stand.

"Can you see them from up here?" chirped a voice in a jubilant, cackling laugh that drew Dellarme's attention to his immediate surroundings, and he saw Grandfather Fragini coming up to join him on the crest. He slid back on his stomach below the sky-line and held up an arresting hand.

"Kept along after you," piped the old man; "and it's just as I thought—the glummest lot of funeral faces I ever seen!"

"You must not remain! Follow that cut there and it will take you out to the road!" Dellarme told grandfather sharply.

"Just got to stay. Too tired to take another step," and grandfather dropped in utter exhaustion. "Have to carry me if you want me to go."

"That means two men out of the line," thought Dellarme.

"You're an archaic old fire-eater!" Stransky remarked in cynical amusement to grandfather Fragini.

"And you're a traitor!" answered grandfather with all the energy he could command.

Now Dellarme disposed his men in line back of the ridge of fresh earth that they had dug in the night, ready to rush to their places when he blew the whistle that hung from his neck, but he did not allow them a glimpse over the crest.

"I know you are curious, but powerful glasses are watching for you to show yourselves; and if a battery turned loose on us you'd understand," he explained.

The men wanted to talk but did not know what to talk about, so they examined their rifles critically as if they were unfamiliar gifts which they had found in their stockings on Christmas morning. Some began to empty their magazines of cartridges for the pleasure or occupation of refilling them; but one of the lieutenants stopped this. It might mean delay when the whistle blew. Thus the hours wore on, and the church clock struck nine and ten.

"Never a movement down there!" called the sergeant from the crest to Dellarme. "Maybe this is just their final bluff before they come to terms about Bodlapoo"—that stretch of African jungle that seemed very far away to them all.

"Let us hope so!" said Dellarme seriously.

"Hope there won't be any war! Just listen to that from an army officer, with the enemy right in front of him!" gasped grandfather.



XVII

A SUNDAY MORNING IN TOWN

"You ought not to leave the house—not this morning," protested Mrs. Galland when Marta was putting on her hat to start for the regular Sunday service of her school.

"The children expect me," Marta explained.

"Hardly, hardly this morning. They will take it for granted that you will not come."

But Marta thrust her hatpin home decisively.

"Jacky Werther will certainly be there. Though he were the only one to come, I would not disappoint him!" she said. "Heaven knows, mother, if there were ever a time for teaching peace it is to-day! And I can't remain inactive. Just to sit still and wait in a time like this—that is too terrible!"

"As you will!" Mrs. Galland responded with gentle resignation.

Garden and veranda were as peaceful as on any other Sunday morning, but it was a different kind of peace—a peace mocked by sounds beyond its boundaries which were to her like the rattling of the steel scales of a demon licking its jaws with its red tongue in voracious anticipation of a gorge and stretching out great steel claws in readiness to sink them into the flesh of its victims when Partow and Westerling gave the word. As Lanstron had said, this demon would feed on every resource and energy of the nation. It had no voice and no thought except kill, kill, kill! And man called this demon patriotism and love of country. Those who risked death in the demon's honor got iron crosses and bronze crosses, but any one who dared to call it by its true name, if a man, received the decoration of the white feather; if a woman, was regarded as a sentimentalist and merely a woman, and told that she did not understand practical human nature.

Choosing to go to town by the castle road rather than down the terrace to the main pass road, Marta, as she emerged from the grounds, saw Feller, garden-shears in hand and in his workman's clothes instead of his Sunday black, a figure of stone watching the approach of some field-batteries. In the week of distracting and cumulative suspense that had elapsed since his secret had been revealed to her, their relations had continued as before. She studiously kept up the fiction of his deafness by writing her orders. The question of allowing him to undertake his part as a spy had drifted into the background of her mind under the distressing and ever-present pressure of the crisis. He was to remain until there was war, and thought about anything that implied that war was coming was the more hideous to her the nearer war approached.

"It will be averted! It cannot be!" she was thinking. Her glimpse of him had no more interest for her at this moment of preoccupation than any other familiar object of the landscape.

"The guns! The guns! How I love the guns!" he was thinking.

She was almost past him before he realized her presence, which he acknowledged by a startled movement and a step forward as he took off his hat. She paused. His eyes were glowing like coals under a blower as he looked at her and again at the batteries, seeming to include her with the guns in the spell of his fervid abstraction. He was unconscious that he had ever been anything but a soldier. His throat was athirst for words and his words craved a listening ear for all the pictures of the machinery of war in motion that crowded his imagination. To him the demon was a fair, beckoning god in cloth of gold—a god of hope and fortune.

"Frontier closed last night to prevent intelligence about our preparations leaking out—Lanny's plan all alive—the guns coming," he went on, his shoulders stiffening, his chin drawing in, his features resolute and beaming with the ardor of youth in action—"troops moving here and there to their places—engineers preparing the defences—automatics at critical points with the infantry—field-wires laid—field-telephones set up—the wireless spitting—the caissons full—planes and dirigibles ready—search-lights in position"

There the torrent of his broken sentences was checked A shadow passed in front of him. He came out of his trance of imageries of activities, so vividly clear to his military mind, to realize that Marta was abruptly leaving.

"Miss Galland!" he called urgently. "Firing may commence at any minute. You must not go into town!"

"But I must!" she declared, speaking over her shoulder while she paused. It was clear that no warning would prevail against her determined mood.

"Then I shall go with you!" he said, starting toward her with a light step, in keeping with the gallantry of a man even younger than his years. He spoke in a tone of protective masculine authority, as an officer might to a woman of whom he was fond when he saw her exposing herself to danger. He would escort her; he would see that no harm befell her. The impulse was spontaneous in an illusion free of the gardener's part. But he saw her lips tighten and a frown gather.

"It is not necessary, thank you!" she answered, more coldly than she had ever spoken to him. This had a magically quick effect on his attitude.

"I beg pardon! I forgot!" he explained in his old man's voice, his head sinking, his shoulders drooping in the humility of a servant who recognizes that he has been properly rebuked for presumption. "Not a gunner any more—I'm a spy!" he thought, as he shuffled off without looking toward the batteries again, though the music of wheels and hoofs was now close by. "I must turn my back on the guns, for they tempt me. And I must win her consent before I shall have even the dignity of a spy—and I will win it!" he added, brightening. "La, la, la! Trust me!"

Marta had a glimpse, as she turned away, of an appealingly pathetic figure bent as under a wound to his spirits, which gave her a sense of personal cruelty in the midst of a wave of pity and regret.

"He is what he is because of the army; a victim of a cult, a habit," she was thinking. "Had he been in any other calling his fine qualities might have been of service to the world and he would have been happy."

Then her sympathy was drawn to another object of war's injustice—a man approaching under the guard of two soldiers. Suddenly the man planted his feet and refused to budge.

"I tell you, it isn't fair!" he cried in rage and appeal. "I tell you, I was only visiting on this side and got caught! I'm a reservist of the first line. If I don't answer the call I'll be branded a shirker in my village, and I've got to live in that village all my life. You better kill me and have done with it!"

"Sorry," said one of the soldiers, "but you were caught trying to sneak. We're acting under orders. No use of balking."

"Who wouldn't sneak?" demanded the prisoner desperately. "Oh, say, be a little human! The worst of it is that I came over here to see my girl to say good-by to her. I'm going to marry her," he pleaded, "though my folks are against it because she's a Brown. It makes me so cheap—it—"

"We were told to take you to the general. He'll let you off if there isn't any war, and he may, anyway. But he sure won't if you resist arrest." The soldiers seized his arms firmly. "Come along!" they said, and he went. Any one must go when a steel claw of the demon enforces the order.

A company of infantry resting among their stacked rifles changed the color of the square in the distance from the gray of pavement to the brown of a mass of uniforms. In the middle of the main street a major of the brigade staff, with a number of junior officers and orderlies, was evidently waiting on some signal. Sentries were posted at regular intervals along the curb. The people in the houses and shops from time to time stopped packing up their effects long enough to go to the doors and look up and down apprehensively, asking bootless, nervous questions.

"Are they coming yet?"

"Do you think they will come?"

"Are you sure it's going to be war?"

"Will they shell the town?"

"There'll be time enough for you to get away!" shouted the major. "All we know is what is written in our instructions, and we shall act on them when the thing starts. Then we are in command. Meanwhile, get ready!"

A lieutenant of a detachment of engineers coming at the double from a cross street stopped to inquire:

"This way to the knitting mills?"

"Straight ahead! Can't go wrong!" the major answered.

"We are going to loophole their walls for the infantry," explained the lieutenant as he hurried on.

"Then they're going to fight in the town!"

"Blow our homes to pieces!"

"Destroy our property!"

After this fusillade from the people the major glared at the retreating back of the lieutenant as much as to say that some men would never learn to hold their tongues. Naturally, the duty of looking after refugees was not to his soldierly taste.

"We are doing it all for you, for the country," he explained. "We are going to make them pay for every foot they take—the invaders!"

"Yes, make them pay!" called a voice from the houses.

"Make them pay!" other voices joined in.

"It isn't the fellows just across the border that want to take our property," said an elderly man. "They're good friends enough. It's the Grays' politicians and the fire-eaters in the other provinces."

"The robbers!" piped a woman's high-pitched note. "I've got a son in the army, and if ever he leaves that mountain range and goes down the other side with the Grays chasing him, he'll get worse from me than the Grays could give him!"

"That's right! That's the way to talk!" came a chorus.

Then the major became aware of a young woman who was going in the wrong direction. Her cheeks were flushed from her rapid walk, her lips were parted, showing firm, white teeth, and her black eyes were regarding him in a blaze of satire or amusement; an emotion, whatever it was, that thoroughly centred his attention.

"Yes," she said, anger getting the better of her, "make them pay—and they make you pay—and you make them pay—and so on!"

The major smiled. It seemed the safe thing to do. He did not know but the young woman might charge.

"Mademoiselle, I am sorry, but unless you live in this direction," he said very politely, "you may not go any farther. Until we have other orders or they attack, every one is supposed to remain in his house or his place of business."

"This is my place of business!" Marta answered, for she was already opposite a small, disused chapel which was her schoolroom, where a half dozen of the faithful children were gathered around the masculine importance of Jacky Werther, one of the older boys.

"Then you are Miss Galland!" said the major, enlightened. His smile had an appreciation of the irony of her occupation at that moment. "Your children are very loyal. They would not tell me where they lived, so we had to let them stay there."

"Those who have homes," she said, identifying each one of the faithful with a glance, "have so many brothers and sisters that they will hardly be missed from the flock. Others have no homes—at least, not much of a one"—here her temper rose again—"taxes being so high in order that you may organize murder and the destruction of property."

"I—" gasped the major under the fire of those black eyes.

But their flashes suddenly splintered into less threatening lights as she realized the fatuity of this personal allusion.

"Oh, I'm not the town scold!" she explained with a nervous little laugh that helped her to recover poise.

With the black eyes in this mood, the major was conscious only of a desire to please which conflicted with duty.

"Now, really, Miss Galland," he began solicitously, "I have been assigned to move the civil population in case of attack. Your children ought—"

"After school! You have your duty this morning and I have mine!" Marta interrupted pleasantly, and turned toward the chapel.

"They are putting sharpshooters in the church tower to get the aeroplanes, and there are lots of the little guns that fire bullets so fast you can't count 'em—and little spring wagons with dynamite to blow things up—and—" Jacky Werther ran on in a series of vocal explosions as Marta opened the door to let the children go in.

"Yet you came!" said Marta with a hand caressingly on his shoulder.

"It looks pretty bad for peace, but we came," answered Jacky, round-eyed, in loyalty. "We'd come right through the bullets 'cause we said we would if we wasn't sick, and we wasn't sick."

"My seven disciples—seven!" exclaimed Marta as she counted them. "And you need not sit on the regular seats, but around me on the platform. It will be more intimate."

"That's grand!" came in chorus. They did not bother, about chairs, but seated themselves on the floor around Marta's skirts.

"My, Miss Galland, but your eyes are bright!"

"And your cheeks are all red!"

"With little spots in the centre!"

"You're very wonderful, Miss Galland!"

The church clock boomed out its deliberate strokes through ten, the hour set for the lesson, and all counted them—one—two—three. Marta was thinking what a dismal little effort theirs was, and yet she was very happy, tremblingly happy in her distraction and excitement, that they had not waited for her at the door of the chapel in vain.

She announced that there would be no talk this morning; they would only say their oath. Repeating in concert the pledge to the boys and girls of other lands, the childish voices peculiarly sweet and harmonious in contrast to the raucous and uneven sounds of foreboding from the street, they came in due course to the words of the concession that the oath made to militancy.

"If an enemy tries to take my land—"

"Children—I—" Marta interrupted with a sense of wonder and shock. They paused and looked at her questioningly. "I had almost forgotten that part!" she breathed confusedly.

"That's the part that makes all we're doing against the Grays right!" put in Jacky Werther promptly.

"As I wrote it for you! 'I shall appeal to his sense of justice and reason with him—'"

Jaws dropped and eyes bulged, for above the sounds of the street rose from the distance the unmistakable crackling of rifle-fire which, as they listened, spread and increased in volume.

"Go on—on to the end of the oath! It will take only a moment," said Marta resolutely. "It isn't much, but it's the best we can do!"



XVIII

THE BAPTISM OF FIRE

After the morning sun commenced to tickle the back of his neck, Eugene Aronson, the giant of the 128th of the Grays, stretched his limbs as healthily as a cub bear.

"No war yet!" he exclaimed, rubbing his eyes.

"Oh, we'd have called you if there were!" said the manufacturer's son, trying to make a joke, which was hard work with his clothes dew-soaked after a sleepless night in the open.

"Wouldn't want you to miss it after coming so far," added the laborer's son, aiming to show that he, too, was in a light-hearted mood.

"And how did you sleep?" asked Eugene, cheerily, of his neighbors.

"Fine!"

"First rate!"

"Like a stone!"

Every man was too intent in forcing his own spontaneity to notice that that of the others was also forced.

"Like a top!" chimed in pasty-faced Peterkin, the valet's son, to be in fashion.

"I didn't sleep much myself; in fact, not at all," said Hugo Mallin.

"Oh, ho!" groaned Pilzer, the butcher's son, with a broad grin that made a crease in the liver patch on his cheek.

"You see, it's a new experience for me," Hugo explained in a drawl, his face drawn as a mask. "I'm not so used to war as you other fellows are. I'm not so brave!"

There was a forced laugh because Hugo appeared droll, and when he appeared droll it was the proper thing to laugh. Besides, in the best humor there is a grain of truth, whether you see it or not. This time a number saw it quite clearly.

"I was thinking how ridiculous we all are," Hugo went on without change of tone or expression, "grovelling here on our stomachs and pretending that we slept when we didn't and that we want to be killed when we don't!"

"White feather again!" Pilzer exclaimed.

"Oh, shut up!" snapped the doctor's son irritably. "Let Hugo talk. He's only gassing. It's so monotonous lying here that any kind of nonsense is better than growling."

"Yes, yes!" the others agreed.

Hugo's outburst of the previous evening was forgotten. They welcomed anything that broke the suspense. Let the regimental wag make a little fun any way that he could. As the officers had withdrawn somewhat to the rear for breakfast, there was no constraint.

"I was thinking how I'd like to go out and shake hands with the Browns," said Hugo. "That's the way fencers and pugilists do before they set to. It seems polite and sportsmanlike, indicating that there's no prejudice."

There was a ripple of half-hearted merriment punctuated by exclamations.

"What a fool idea!"

"How do all your notions get into your head, Hugo?"

"Sometimes by squinting at the moonlight and counting odd numbers; sometimes by knowing that anything that's different is ridiculous; and sometimes by looking for tangent truths out of professorial ruts," Hugo observed with a sort of erudite discursiveness which was the rank dissimulation of a hypocrite to Pilzer and wholly confusing to Peterkin, not to say a draught on mental effort for many of the others. "For instance, I got a good one from two fellows of the Browns whom I met on the road the first day we arrived. They were reservists. We were soon talking together and so peaceably that I was sceptical if they were Browns at all. So I determined on a test. I told them I was from a distant province and hadn't travelled much and wouldn't they please take off their hats. They consented very good-naturedly."

"Oh, good old Hugo! He got one on the Browns!"

"I'd like to have been there to see it!"

"And when they took off their hats, what then?"

"Why, I said: 'This isn't convincing at all.'" Hugo's drawl paused for a second while interest developed. "'You haven't any horns! Haven't you any forked tails, either? Or are they curled up nicely inside your trousers' legs?'"

"Whew! But they must have felt cheap to have been got in that way!"

"And old Hugo looking so solemn!"

"Just like he does now!"

But the judge's son said under his breath, "Very pretty!" and the doctor's son, who was next him in the ranks, nodded understandingly.

"It seems they had checked their horns and tails at the frontier," Hugo continued, "and, as I had left mine hanging in the rifle racks at the barracks, we got on together like real human beings. I found they could speak my language better than my lesson-book try at theirs—yes, as well as I can speak it myself—and that made it all the easier. After a while I mentioned the war. They were very amiable and they didn't begin to call me a swill-eating land-shark or any other of the pretty names I've heard they are so fond of using. 'We want to keep what is ours,' they said. 'Your side will have to start the fight by crossing the line. We shall not!"'

"Because they know they'll be licked!" put in Pilzer hotly.

"No, we may beat them in fighting," agreed Hugo, "but these two fellows had me beaten on the argument!"

"They hauled down our flag! They insulted us in their despatches! They quibble! They're the perfidious Browns!" cried big Eugene Aronson, speaking the lesson taught him by the newspapers, which had it from the premier.

"There, he's got you again, Gene!"

"Yes, you funny old simpleton! You are almost too easy!"

There was something of the vivacity of the barrack-room banter in the exclamations at Eugene's expense. Yet they were not the same. The look on no man's face was the same. The humorist was silent.

"What next, Hugo?"

He half stared at them, and his mask was not solemn but tragic.

"I was thinking how men work their courage up, as if patriotism were a Moloch of which they were afraid," he said. "How in order to get killed we go out to kill others, when right is on their side! How you, Armand, or you, Eugene, might be dead before to-morrow! How—."

"The bullet is not made that will get me!" exclaimed Eugene, with a swelling breath from his bellows-like lungs.

"Take him home to mother!" groaned Pilzer.

"That will do for you, Hugo Mallin!" came another interruption, a sharp one from Captain Fracasse, who had returned unobserved from the rear in time to overhear Hugo's remarks. "And that's the way to talk, Aronson and Pilzer. As for you, Mallin, I've a mind to put you under arrest and send you back for a coward! A coward—do you hear?"

"Ah-h!" breathed Pilzer in a guttural of satisfaction.

Hugo crimsoned at first in confusion, then he looked frankly and unflinchingly at the captain.

"Very well, sir!" he said with a certain dignity which Fracasse, who was a good deal of a martinet, found very irritating.

"No, that would suit you too well!" Fracasse declared. "You shall stay! You shall do the duty for which your country trained you and take your share of the chances."

"Yes, sir!" answered Hugo. "But won't you," he asked persuasively and with the wondering inquiry of the suggestion that had sprung into his heretic brain, "won't you ask the men if there are not some here who really, in their hearts, the logic of their hearts—which is often better than brain logic—do not believe just as I do?"

"Have you gone insane? There are none!" In the impulse of anger that swept his cheeks with a red wave Fracasse half drew his sword as if he would strike Hugo. "And, Mallin, you are a marked man. I shall watch you! I'll have the lieutenants and sergeants watch you. At the first sign of flunking I'll make an example of you!"

"Yes, sir," answered Hugo, with the automatic deference of private to officer but with a reserved and studious inquiry that made the captain bite his lip.

"I'll have Aronson and Pilzer watch you, too!" Fracasse added.

"Yes, sir!" said Pilzer promptly.

Then, under the restraint of the captain's presence, there was a silence that endured. The men were left to the sole resource of their thoughts and observation of their surroundings. They were lying in a pasture facing the line of white posts whose tops ran in an even row over level ground. On the other side of the boundary was a wheat-field. Here a farmer had commenced his fall ploughing. His plough was in the furrow where he had left it when he unhitched his team for the day, before an orderly had come to tell him that he must move out of his house overnight. The wheat stubble swept on up to a knoll in the distance.

All the landscape in front of Fracasse's company seemed to have been deserted; no moving figures were anywhere in sight; no sign of the enemy's infantry. No trains came or went along the lines of steel into the mountain tunnel, which had been mined at a dozen points by the Browns. No vehicles and no foot-passengers dotted the highway into the town. Over the mountains and over the plain, planes and dirigibles moved in wide circles restively, watching for a signal as hawks watch for prey. Suspense this—suspense of such a swift vibration that it was like a taut G string of a violin under the bow!

Faintly the town clock was heard striking the hour. From eight to nine and nine to ten Fracasse's men waited; waited until the machine was ready and Westerling should throw in the clutch; waited until the troops were in place for the first move before he hurled his battalions forward. Every pawn of flesh facing the white posts had a thousand thoughts whirling in such a medley that he could be said to have no thought at all, only an impression juggled by destiny. No one would have confessed what he felt, while physical inactivity gave free rein to mental activity. That thing of a nation's nightmare; that thing for which generations had drilled without its materializing; that thing of speculation, of hazard, of horror; that thing of quick action and long-enduring consequences was coming.

They did not know how the captain at their back received his orders; they only heard the note of the whistle, with a command familiar to a trained instinct on the edge of anticipation. It released a spring in their nerve-centres. They responded as the wheels respond when the throttle is opened. Jumping to their feet they broke into a run, bodies bent, heads down, like the peppered silhouette that faced Westerling's desk. What they had done repeatedly in drills and manoeuvres they were now doing in war, mechanically as marionettes.

"Come on! The bullet is not made that can get me! Come on!" cried the giant Eugene Aronson.

He leaped over a white post and then over the plough, which was also in his path. Little Peterkin felt his legs trembling. They seemed to be detached from his will, and the company's and the captain's will, and churning in pantomime or not moving at all. If Hugo Mallin had been called a coward, what of himself? What of the stupid of the company, who would never learn even the manual of arms correctly, as the drill-sergeant often said? A new fear made him glance around. He would not have been surprised to find that he was already in the rear. But instead he found that he was keeping up, which was all that was necessary, as more than one other man assured his legs. After thirty or forty yards most of the legs, if not Peterkin's, had worked out their shiver and nearly all felt the exhilaration of movement in company. Then came the sound that generations had drilled for without hearing; the sound that summons the imagination of man in the thought of how he will feel and act when he hears it; the sound that is everywhere like the song snatches of bees driven whizzing through the air.

"That's it! We're under fire! We're under fire!" flashed as crooked lightning recognition of the sound through every brain.

There was no sign of any enemy; no telling where the bullets came from.

"Such a lot of them, one must surely get me!" Peterkin thought.

Whish-whish! Th-ipp-whing! The refrain gripped his imagination with an unseen hand. He seemed to be suffocating. He wanted to throw himself down and hold his hands in front of his head. While Pilzer and Aronson were not thinking, only running, Peterkin was thinking with the rapidity of a man falling from a high building. Worse! He did not know how far he had to go. He was certain only that he was bound to strike ground.

"An inch is as good as a mile!" He recollected the captain's teaching. "Only one of a thousand bullets fired in war ever kills a man"—but he was certain that he had heard a million already. Then one passed very close, its swift breath brushing his cheek with a whistle like a s-s-st through the teeth. He dodged so hard that he might have dislocated his neck; he gasped and half stumbled, but realized that he had not been hit. And he must keep right on going, driven by one fear against another, in face of those ghastly whispers which the others, for the most part, in the excitement of a charge, had ceased to hear.

Again he would be sure that his legs, which he was urging so frantically to their duty, were not playing pantomime. He looked around to find that he was still keeping up with Eugene and felt the thrill of the bravery of fellowship at sight of the giant's flushed, confident face revelling in the spirit of a charge. And then, just then, Eugene convulsively threw up his arms, dropped his rifle, and whirled on his heel. As he went down his hand clutched at his left breast and came away red and dripping. After one wild, backward glance, Peterkin plunged ahead.

"Eugene!" Hugo Mallin had stopped and bent over Eugene in the supreme instinct of that terrible second, supporting his comrade's head.

"The bullet is not—made—." Eugene whispered, the ruling passion strong to the last. A flicker of the eyelids, a gurgle in the throat, and he was dead.

Fracasse had been right behind them. The sight of a man falling was something for which he was prepared; something inevitably a part of the game. A man down was a man out of the fight, service finished. A man up with a rifle in his hand was a man who ought to be in action.

"Here, you are not going to get out this way!" he said in the irritation of haste, slapping Hugo with his sword. "Go on! That's hospital-corps work."

Hugo had a glimpse of the captain's rigid features and a last one of Eugene's, white and still and yet as if he were about to speak his favorite boast; then he hurried on, his side glance showing other prostrate forms. One form a few yards away half rose to call "Hospital!" and fell back, struck mortally by a second bullet.

"That's what you get if you forget instructions," said Fracasse with no sense of brutality, only professional exasperation, "Keep down, you wounded men!" he shouted at the top of his voice.

The colonel of the 128th had not looked for immediate resistance. He had told Fracasse's men to occupy the knoll expeditiously. But by the common impulse of military training, no less than in answer to the whistle's call, in face of the withering fire they dropped to earth at the base of the knoll, where Hugo threw himself down at full length in his place in line next to Peterkin.

"Fire pointblank at the crest in front of you! I saw a couple of men standing up there!" called Fracasse. "Fire fast! That's the way to keep down their fire—pointblank, I tell you! You're firing into the sky! I want to see more dust kicked up. Fire fast! We'll have them out of there soon! They're only an outpost."