Hugo was firing vaguely, like a man in a dream, and thinking that maybe up there on the knoll were the two Browns he had met on the road and perhaps their comrades were as fond of them as he was of Eugene. It is a mistake for a soldier to think much, as Westerling had repeatedly said.

Pilzer was shooting to kill. His eye had the steely gleam of his rifle sight and the liver patch on his cheek was a deeper hue as he sought to avenge Eugene's death. Drowned by the racket of their own fire, not even Peterkin was hearing the whish-whish of the bullets from Dellarme's company now. He did not know that the blacksmith's son, who was the fourth man from him, lay with his chin on his rifle stock and a tiny trickle of blood from a hole in his forehead running down the bridge of his nose.

Fracasse, glancing along from rifle to rifle, as a weaver watches the threads of a machine loom, saw that Hugo was firing at too high an angle.

"Mallin!" he called. Hugo did not hear because of the noise, and Fracasse had to creep nearer, which was anything but cooling to his temper. "You fool! You are shooting fifty feet above the top of the knoll! Look along your sight!" he yelled.

Fracasse observed, with some surprise, that Hugo's hand was steady as he carefully drew a bead. Hugo saw a spurt of dust at the point slightly below the crest where he aimed; for he was the best shot in the company at target practice.

"I'm not killing anybody!" he thought happily.



XIX

RECEIVING THE CHARGE

What about Stransky of the Reds, who would not fight to please the ruling classes? What about Grandfather Fragini, who would fight on principle whenever a Gray was in sight? Now we leave the story of Fracasse's men at the foot of the knoll for that of the Browns on the crest.

Young Dellarme, new to his captain's rank, with lips pressed tightly together, his delicately moulded, boyish features reflecting the confidence which it was his duty to inspire in his company, watching the plain through his glasses, saw the movement of mounted officers to the rear of the 128th as a reason for summoning his men.

"Creep up! Don't show yourselves! Creep up—carefully—carefully!" he kept repeating as they crawled forward on their stomachs. "And no one is to fire until the command comes."

Hugging the cover of the ridge of fresh earth which they had thrown up the previous night, they watched the white posts. Stransky, who had been ruminatively silent all the morning, was in his place, but he was not looking at the enemy. Cautiously, to avoid a reprimand, he raised his head to enable him to glance along the line. All the faces seemed drawn and clayish.

"They don't want to fight! They're just here because they're ordered here and haven't the character to defy authority," he thought. "The leaven is working! My time is coming!"

But Grandfather Fragini's cheeks had a hectic flush; his heart was beating with the exhilaration of an old war-horse. Looking over Tom's shoulder, he squinted into the distance, his underlip quivering against his toothless gums.

"My eyesight's kind of uncertain," he said. "Can you see 'em?"

"There by the white posts—those lying figures!" said Tom. "They're almost the color of the stubble."

"So I do, the land-sharks! Down on their bellies, too! No flag, either! But that ain't no reason why we shouldn't have a flag. It ought to be waving at 'em in defiance right over our heads!"

"Flags draw fire. They let the enemy know where you are,' Tom explained.

"The Hussars didn't bother about that. We let out a yell and went after 'em!" growled grandfather. "Appears to me the fighting these days is grovelling in the dirt and taking care nobody don't get hurt!"

"Oh, there'll be enough hurt—don't you worry about that!" said a voice from the line.

"Good thing an old fellow who's been under fire is along to stiffen you rookies!" replied grandfather tartly. "You'll be all right once you get going. You'll settle down to be real soldiers yet. And I'd like to hear a little more cussing. How the Hussars used to cuss! Too much reading and writing nowadays. It makes men too ladylike."

By this time he had once more attracted the captain's attention.

"Grandfather Fragini, you must drop back—you must! If you don't, I'll have you carried back!" called Dellarme, sparing the old man only a glance from his concentrated observation on the front.

When he looked again at the enemy any thought of carrying out his threat vanished, for the minute had come when all his training was to be put to a test. The figures on the other side of the white posts were rising. He was to prove by the way he directed a company of infantry in action whether or not he was worthy of his captain's rank. He breathed one of those unspoken prayers that are made to the god of one's own efficient, conscientious responsibility to duty. The words of it were: "May I keep my head as if I were at drill!" Then he smiled cheerily. In order that he might watch how each man used his rifle, he drew back of the line, his slim body erect as he rested on one knee, his head level with the other heads while he fingered his whistle. His lieutenants followed his example even to the detail of his cheery smile. There was a slight stirring of heads and arms as eyes drew beads on human targets. The instant that Eugene Aronson sprang over the white post a blast from Dellarme's whistle began the war.

It was a signal, too, for Stransky to play the part he had planned; to make the speech of his life. His six feet of stature shot to its feet with a Jack-in-the-box abruptness, under the impulse of a mighty and reckless passion.

"Men, stop firing!" he cried thunderously. "Stop firing on your brothers! Like you, they are only the pawns of the ruling class, who keep us all pawns in order that they may have champagne and caviare. Comrades, I'll lead you! Comrades, we'll take a white flag and go down to meet our comrades and we'll find that they think as we do! I'll lead you!"

Grandfather Fragini, impelled by the hysterical call of the Hussar spirit, also sprang up, waving his hat and trembling and swaying with the emotion that racked his old body.

"Give it to 'em! Aim low! Give it to 'em—give it to 'em, horns and hoofs, sabre and carbine!" he shouted in a high, jumpy voice. "Give it to 'em! Make 'em weep! Make 'em whine! Make 'em bellow!"

Both appeals were drowned in the cracking of the rifles working as regularly as punching-machines in a factory. Every soldier was seeing only his sight and the running figures under it. Mechanically and automatically, training had been projected into action, anticipation into realization. A spectator might as well have called to a man in a hundred-yard dash to stop running, to an oarsman in a race to jump out of his shell.

So centred was Dellarme in watching his men and the effect of their fire that he did not notice the two silhouettes on the sky-line, making ridicule of all his care about keeping his company under cover, until the doctor, who alone had nothing to do as yet, touched him on the arm. At the moment he looked around, and before he could speak a command, a hospital-corps man who was near Grandfather Fragini threw himself in a low tackle and brought the old man to earth, while the company sergeant sprang for Stransky with an oath. But Stransky was in no mood to submit. He felled the sergeant with a blow and, recklessly defiant, stared at Dellarme, while the men, steadily firing, were still oblivious of the scene. The sergeant, stunned, rose to his knees and reached for his revolver. Dellarme, bent over to keep his head below the crest, had already drawn his as he hastened toward them.

"Stransky," said Dellarme, "you have struck an officer under fire! You have refused to fight! Within the law I am warranted in shooting you dead!"

"Well!" answered Stransky, throwing back his head, his face seeming all big, bony nose and heavy jaw and burning eyes.

"Will you get down? Will you take your place with your rifle?" demanded Dellarme.

Stransky laughed thunderously in scorn. He was handsome, titanic, and barbaric, with his huge shoulders stretching his blouse, which fell loosely around his narrow hips, while the fist that had felled the sergeant was still clenched.

"No!" said Stransky. "You won't kill much if you kill me and you'd kill less if you shot yourself! God Almighty! Do you think I'm afraid? Me—afraid?"

His eyes in a bloodshot glare, as uncompromising as those of a bull in an arena watching the next move of the red cape of the matador, regarded Dellarme, who hesitated in the revulsion of the horror of killing and in admiration of the picture of human force before him. But the old sergeant, smarting under the insult of the blow, his sandstone features mottled with red patches, had no compunctions of this order. He was ready to act as executioner.

"If you don't want to shoot, I can! An example—the law! There's no other way of dealing with him! Give the word!" he said to Dellarme.

Stransky laughed, now in strident cynicism. It was the laugh of the red, of bastardy, of blanketless nights in the hedgerows, and boot soles worn through to the macadam, with the dust of speeding automobiles blown in the gaunt face of hunger. Dellarme still hesitated, recollecting Lanstron's remark. He pictured Stransky in a last stand in a redoubt, and every soldier was as precious to him as a piece of gold to a miser.

"One ought to be enough to kill me if you're going to do it to slow music," said Stransky. "You might as well kill me as the poor fools that your poor fools are trying to—"

Another breath finished the speech; a breath released from a ball that seemed to have come straight from hell. The fire-control officer of a regiment of Gray artillery on the plain, scanning the landscape for the origin of the rifle-fire which was leaving many fallen in the wake of the charge of the Gray infantry, had seen two figures on the knoll. "How kind! Thank you!" his thought spoke faster than words. No need of range-finding! The range to every possible battery or infantry position around La Tir was already marked on his map. He passed the word to his guns.

The burst of their first shrapnel-shell blinded all three actors in the scene on the crest of the knoll with its ear-splitting crack and the force of its concussion threw Stransky down beside the sergeant. Dellarme, as his vision cleared, had just time to see Stransky jerk his hand up to his temple, where there was a red spot, before another shell burst, a little to the rear. This was harmless, as a shrapnel's shower of fragments and bullets carry forward from the point of explosion. But the next burst in front of the line. The doctor's period of idleness was over. One man's rifle shot up as his spine was broken by a jagged piece of shrapnel jacket. Now there were too many shells to watch them individually.

"It's all right—all right, men!" Dellarme called again, assuming his cheery smile. "It takes a lot of shrapnel to kill anybody. Our batteries will soon answer!"

His voice was unheard, yet its spirit was felt. The men knew through their training that there was no use of dodging and that their best protection was an accurate fire of their own.

"Shelling us, the —— ——!" gasped Grandfather Fragini, who had experience, if he were weak in reading and writing. "All noise and smoke!"—as it was to a larger degree in his day.

Stransky had half risen, a new kind of savagery dawning on his features as he regained his wits. With inverted eyes he regarded the red ends of his fingers, held in line with the bridge of his nose. He felt of the wound again, now that he was less dizzy. It was only a scratch and he had been knocked down like a beef in an abattoir by an unseen enemy, on whom he could not lay hands! He glared around as if in search of the hidden antagonist. The sergeant had crept forward to be a steadying influence to the men in their first trial, if need be, and the doctor and a hospital-corps man were dragging a wounded man out of fine without exposing their own shoulders above the crest. Stransky rolled his eyes in and out; the tendons of his neck swelled; his jaw worked as if crunching pebbles. Deafeningly, the shrapnel jackets continued to crack with "ukung-s-sh—ukung-s-sh" as the swift breath of the shrapnel missiles spread.

"Give it to 'em! Give it to 'em!" Grandfather Fragini cried, his old voice a quavering bird note in the pandemonium. "My, but they do come fast!" he gasped.

Yes, a trifle faster than in your day, grandfather, when a gun of the horse-artillery had to be relaid after the recoil, which is now taken up by an oil chamber, while the gunner on his seat behind the breech keeps the sight steady on the target. The guns of one battery of that Gray regiment of artillery, each firing six fourteen-pound shells a minute methodically, every shell loaded with nearly two hundred projectiles, were giving their undivided attention to the knoll.

How long could his company endure this? Dellarme might well ask. He knew that he would not be expected to withdraw yet. With a sense of relief he saw Fracasse's men drop for cover at the base of the knoll and then, expectation fulfilled, he realized that rifle-fire now reinforced the enemy's shell fire. His duty was to remain while he could hold his men, and a feeling toward them such as he had never felt before, which was love, sprang full-fledged into his heart as he saw how steadily they kept up their fusillade.

The sergeant, who now had time to think of Stransky, was seized with a spasm of retributive rage. He drew his revolver determinedly.

"You brought this on! I'll do for you!" he cried, turning toward the spot where he had left Stransky, only to lower his revolver in amazement as he saw Stransky, eager in response to a new passion, spring forward into place and pick up his rifle.

"If you will not have it my way, take it yours!" said the best shot in the company, as he began firing with resolute coolness.

"They have a lot of men down," said Dellarme, his glasses showing the many prostrate figures on the wheat stubble. "Steady! steady! We have plenty of batteries back in the hills. One will be in action soon."

But would one? He understood that with their smokeless powder the Gray guns could be located only by their flashes, which would not be visible unless the refraction of light were favorable. Then "thur-eesh—thur-eesh" above every other sound in a long wail! No man ever forgets the first crack of a shrapnel at close quarters, the first bullet breath on his cheek, or the first supporting shell from his side in flight that passes above him.

"That is ours!" called Dellarme.

"Ours!" shouted the sergeant.

"Ours!" sang the thought of every one of the men.

Over the Gray batteries on the plain an explosive ball of smoke hung in the still air; then another beside it.

"Thur-eesh—thur-eesh—thur-eesh," the screaming overhead became a gale that built a cloud of blue smoke over the offending Gray batteries—beautiful, soft blue smoke from which a spray of steel descended. There was no spotting the flashes of the Browns' guns in order to reply to them, for they were under the cover of a hill, using indirect aim as nicely and accurately as In firing pointblank. The gunners of the Gray batteries could not go on with their work under such a hail-storm, they were checkmated. They stopped firing and began moving to a new position, where their commander hoped to remain undiscovered long enough to support the 128th by loosing his lightnings against the defenders at the critical moment of the next charge, which would be made as soon as Fracasse's men had been reinforced.

There was an end to the concussions and the thrashing of the air around Dellarme's men, and they had the relief of a breaking abscess in the ear. But they became more conscious of the spits of dust in front of their faces and the passing whistles of bullets. In return, they made the sections of Gray infantry in reserve rushing across the levels, leave many gray lumps behind. But Fracasse's men at the foot of the slope poured in a heavier and still heavier fire.

"Down there's where we need the shells now!" spoke the thought of Dellarme's men, which he had anticipated by a word to the signal corporal, who waved his flag one—two—three—four—five times. Come on, now, with more of your special brand of death, fire-control officer! Your own head is above the sky-line, though your guns are hidden. Five hundred yards beyond the knoll is the range! Come on!

He came with a burst of screams so low in flight that they seemed to brush the back of the men's necks with a hair broom at the rate of a thousand feet a second. Having watched the result, Dellarme turned with a confirmatory gesture, which the corporal translated into the wigwag of "Correct!" The shrapnel smoke hanging over Fracasse's men appeared a heavenly blue to Dellarme's men.

"They are going to start for us soon! Oh, but we'll get a lot of them!" whispered Stransky gleefully to his rifle.

Dellarme glanced again toward the colonel's station. No sign of the retiring flag. He was glad of that. He did not want to fall back in face of a charge; to have his men silhouetted in the valley as they retreated. And the Grays would not endure this shower-bath long without going one way or the other. He gave the order to fix bayonets, and hardly was it obeyed when he saw flashes of steel through the shrapnel smoke as the Grays fixed theirs. The Grays had five hundred yards to go; the Browns had the time that it takes running men to cover the distance in which to stop the Grays.

"We'll spear any of them who has the luck to get this far!" whispered Stransky to his rifle. The sentence was spoken in the midst of a salvo of shrapnel cracks, which he did not hear. He heard nothing, thought nothing, except to kill.

The Gray batteries on the plain, having taken up a new position and being reinforced, played on the crest at top speed instantly the Gray line rose and started up the slope at the run. With the purpose of confusing no less than killing, they used percussion, which burst on striking the ground, as well as shrapnel, which burst by a time-fuse in the air. Fountains of sod and dirt shot upward to meet descending sprays of bullets. The concussions of the earth shook the aim of Dellarme's men, blinded by smoke and dust, as they fired through a fog at bent figures whose legs were pumping fast in dim pantomime.

But the guns of the Browns, also, have word that the charge has begun. The signal corporal is waiting for the gesture from Dellarme agreed upon as an announcement. The Brown artillery commander cuts his fuses two hundred and fifty yards shorter. He, too, uses percussion for moral effect.

Half of the distance from the foot to the crest of the knoll Fracasse's men have gone in face of the hot, sizzling tornado of bullets, when there is a blast of explosions in their faces with all the chaotic and irresistible force of a volcanic eruption. Not only are they in the midst of the first lot of the Browns' shells at the shorter range, but one Gray battery has either made a mistake in cutting its fuses or struck a streak of powder below standard, and its shells burst among those whom it is aiming to assist.

The ground seems rising under the feet of Fracasse's company; the air is split and racked and wrenched and torn with hideous screams of invisible demons. The men stop; they act on the uncontrollable instinct of self-preservation against an overwhelming force of nature. A few without the power of locomotion drop, faces pressed to the ground. The rest flee toward a shoulder of the slope through the instinct that leads a hunted man in a street into an alley. In a confusion of arms and legs, pressing one on the other, no longer soldiers, only a mob, they throw themselves behind the first protection that offers itself. Fracasse also runs. He runs from the flame of a furnace door suddenly thrown open.

The Gray batteries have ceased firing; certain gunners' ears burn under the words of inquiry as to the cause of the mistake from an artillery commander. Dellarme's men are hugging the earth too close to cheer. A desire to spring up and yell may be in their hearts, but they know the danger of showing a single unnecessary inch of their craniums above the sky-line. The sounds that escape their throats are those of a winning team at a tug of war as diaphragms relax.

With the smoke clearing, they see twenty or thirty Grays plastered on the slope at the point where the charge was checked. Every one of those prostrate forms is within fatal range. Not one moves a finger; even the living are feigning death in the hope of surviving. Among them is little Peterkin, so faithful in forcing his refractory legs to keep pace with his comrades. If he is always up with them they will never know what is in his heart and call him a coward. As he has been knocked unconscious, he has not been in the pell-mell retreat.

His first stabbing thought on coming to was that he must be dead; but, no; he was opening his eyes sticky with dust. At least, he must be wounded! He had not power yet to move his hands in order to feel where, and when they grew alive enough to move, what he saw in front of him held them frigidly still. His nerves went searching from his head to his feet and—miracle of Heaven!—found no point of pain or spot soppy with blood. If he were really hit there was bound to be one or the other, he knew from reading.

Between him and the faces of the Browns—yes, the actual, living, terrible Browns—above the glint of their rifle barrels, was no obstacle that could stop a bullet, though not more than three feet away was a crater made by a shell burst. The black circle of every muzzle on the crest seemed to be pointing at him. When were they going to shoot? When was he to be executed? Would he be shot in many places and die thus? Or would the very first bullet go through his head? Why didn't they fire? What were they waiting for? The suspense was unbearable. The desperation of overwhelming fear driving him in irresponsible impulse, he doubled up his legs and with a cat's leap sprang for the crater.

A blood-curdling burst of whistles passed over his head as a dozen rifles cracked. This time he was surely killed! He was in some other world! Which was it, the good or the bad? The good, for he had a glimpse of blue sky. No, that could not be, for he had been alive when he leaped for the crater, and there he was pressed against the soft earth of its bottom. He burrowed deeper blissfully. He was the nearest to the enemy of any man of the 128th, and he certainly had passed through a gamut of emotions in the half-hour since Eugene Aronson had leaped over a white post.

* * * * *

"Confound it! If we'd kept on we'd have got them! Now we have to do it all over again!" growled Fracasse distractedly as he looked around at the faces hugging the cover of the shoulder—faces asking, What next? each in its own way; faces blank and white; faces with lips working and eyes blinking; faces with the blood rushing back to cheeks in baffled anger. One, however, was half smiling—Hugo Mallin's.

"You did your share of the running, I'll warrant, Mallin!" said Fracasse excitedly, venting his disgust on a particular object.

"Yes, sir," answered Hugo. "It was very hard to maintain a semblance of dignity. Yes, sir, I kept near you all the time so you could watch me. Wasn't that what you wanted me to do, sir?"

"Good old Hugo! The same old Hugo!" breathed the spirit of the company. Three or four men burst into a hysterical laugh as if something had broken in their throats. Everybody felt better for this touch of drollery except the captain. Yet, possibly, it may have helped him in recovering his poise. Sometimes even a pin-prick will have this effect.

"Silence!" he said in his old manner. "I will give you something to joke about other than a little setback like this! Get up there with your rifles!"

He formed the nucleus of a firing-line under cover of the shoulder, and then set the remainder of his company to work with their spades making a trench. The second battalion of the 128th, which faced the knoll, was also digging at the base of the slope, and another regiment in reserve was deploying on the plain. After the failure to rush the knoll the Gray commander had settled down to the business of a systematic approach.

And what of those of Fracasse's men who had not run but had dropped in their tracks when the charge halted? They were between two lines of fire. There was no escape. Some of the wounded had a mercifully quick end, others suffered the consciousness of being hit again and again; the dead were bored through with bullet holes. In torture, the survivors prayed for death; for all had to die except Peterkin, the pasty-faced little valet's son.

Peterkin was quite safe, hugging the bottom of the shell crater under a swarm of hornets. In a surprisingly short time he became accustomed to the situation and found himself ravenously hungry, for the strain of the last twelve hours had burned up tissue. He took a biscuit out of his knapsack and began nibbling it, as became a true rodent.



XX

MARTA'S FIRST GLIMPSE OF WAR

As Marta and the children came to the door of the chapel after the recitation of the oath, she saw the civil population moving along the street in the direction of the range. Suddenly they paused in a common impulse and their heads turned as one head on the fulcrum of their necks, and their faces as one face in a set stare looked skyward.

"Keep on moving! No danger!" called the major of the brigade staff. "Pass the word—no danger! It's not going to drop any bombs; it's only a scout plane trying to locate the positions of the defences we've thrown up overnight. No danger—keep moving!"

He might as well have tried to distract the attention of the grand stand from the finish of a horse-race. More than the wizard's spell, years before, at the first sight of man in flight held them in suspense as they watched a plane approaching with the speed of an albatross down the wind straight on a line with the church tower where the sharpshooters were posted. The spread of the wings grew broader; the motor was making a circle of light as large as a man's hat-box, and the aviator was the size of some enormous insect when three or four sharp reports were audible from the church tower.

Still the plane came on intact over the spire. The sharpshooters had only rimmed the target, without injury to braces or engine. But they had another chance from the windows on the nearer side of the tower; and the crowd saw there the glint of rifle barrels. This time they got the bull's-eye. The aviator reeled and dropped sidewise, a dead weight caught by the braces, with his arm dangling. A teetering dip of the plane and his body was shaken free. His face, as he neared the earth in his descent, bore the surprised look of a man thumped on the back unexpectedly.

Marta pressed her fingers to her ears, but not soon enough to keep out the sound of a thud on the roof of the building across the street from the chapel.

"I was a coward to do that! I shall see worse things!" she thought, and went to the major, who had turned to the affairs of the living directly he saw that neither the corpse of the aviator nor the wreck of the plane was to strike in the street. "I will look after these children," she said, "and we will care for as many of the old and sick as we can in our house."

"The children will find their relatives or guardians in the procession there," he answered methodically. "If they do not, the government will look after them. It will not do for you to take them to your house. That would only complicate the matter of their safety." Here he was interrupted by a precipitate question from one of his lieutenants, who had come running up. "No! No matter what the excuse, no one can remain!" he answered. "The nation is not going to take the risk of letting spies get information to the enemy for the sake of gratifying individual interests. Every one must go!" Then he called to an able-bodied citizen of thirty years or so in the procession: "Here, you, if you're not in the reserve I have work for you!"

"But I was excused from army service on account of heart trouble!" explained the able-bodied citizen.

"We all have heart trouble to-day," remarked the major pithily. "Men are giving up their lives in defence of you and your property. Every man of your age must do his share when required. Go with this orderly!" was the final and tart conclusion of the argument. "And see that he is made useful," he added to the orderly.

An explosion in the factory district made windows rattle and brought an hysterical outcry from some of the women.

"It's nothing!" the major called, in the assurance of a shepherd to his sheep. "Blowing up some building that furnish cover for the enemy's approach in front of our infantry positions! You will hear more of it. Don't worry! Do as you're told! Keep moving! Keep moving!"

Now he had time to conclude what he had to say to Marta.

"As your house will soon be under fire, it will be not refuge for the children; and, in any event, we should net want to leave them to the care of the Grays with the parents on our side," he explained in a manner none the less final because of its politeness. "Every detail has been systematically arranged under government supervision. Private efforts will only bring confusion and hardship where we would have order and all possible mercy. As for the old, the sick, and the infirm—those who cannot bear being carried far are being moved to the hospital and barracks outside the town."

In proof of his words, ambulances and requisitioned carriages filled with the sick and infirm were already proceeding up one of the side streets.

"It's not human, though!" Marta exclaimed in the desperation of helplessness.

"No, it is war, which has a habit of being inhuman," replied the major, turning to call to a woman: "Now, madame, if you leave that pillow behind you will not be dropping your other things and having to stop all the time to pick them up!"

"But it's the finest goose feathers and last year's crop!" said the woman; and then gasped: "Oh, Lord! I left my silver jug on the mantel!"

"As I've told you before—as the printed slips we distributed when we woke you at dawn told you," said the major with some asperity, "you were to take only light things easily portable, and after you had gone, wagons would get what you had packed and left ready at the door of your houses, with your names clearly marked, up to two hundred pounds. The rest we trust to the mercy of the Grays."

There was nothing for Marta to do but start homeward. The thought that her mother was alone made her hasten at a pace much more rapid than the procession of people, whose talk and exclamations formed a monotone audible in its nearness, despite the continuous rifle-fire, now broken by the pounding of the guns.

"I wish I had brought the clock—it was my great-grandfather's."

"Johnny, you keep close to me!"

"And they've taken my wife off to the hospital—separated us!"

Some were excruciatingly alive to the situation; others were in a daze. But one cry always roused them from their complaints; always brought a flash to the dullest eye: Retribution! retribution! Taken from their peaceful pursuits arbitrarily by the final authority of physical force, which they could not dispute, their minds turned in primitive passion to revenge through physical force.

"I hope our army makes them pay!"

"Yes, make them pay! Make them pay!"

"It's all done to beat the Grays, isn't it, Miss Galland? They are trying to take our land," said Jacky Werther as Marta parted from him.

"Yes, it is done to beat the Grays," she answered. "Good luck, Jacky!"

Yes, yes, to beat the Grays! The same, idea—the fighting nature, the brute nature of man—animated both sides. Had the Browns really tried for peace? Had they, in the spirit of her oath, appealed to justice and reason? Why hadn't their premier before all the world said to the premier of the Grays, as one honest, friendly neighbor to another over a matter of dispute:

"We do not want war. We know you outnumber us, but we know you would not take advantage of that. If we are wrong we will make amends; if you are wrong we know that you will. Let us not play tricks in secret to gain points, we civilized nations, but be frank with each other. Let us not try to irritate each other or to influence our people, but to realize how much we have in common and that our only purpose is common progress and happiness."

But no. This was against the precedent of Cain, who probably got Abel into a cul-de-sac, handed down to the keeping of the Roman aristocrat, the baron, the first Galland, and the fat, pompous little man. It would deprive armies of an occupation. It would make statesmanship too simple and naive to have the distinction of craft, which gave one man the right to lead another. Both sides had to act in the old fashion of mutual suspicion and chicanery.

She was overwrought in the fervor of her principles; she was in an anguish of protest. Her spirit, in arms against an overwhelming fact that was wrong, sinful, ridiculous, demanded some expression in action. Now she was half running, both running away from horror and toward horror; in a shuttle of resolutions and emotions: a being at war with war. Passing the head of the procession, she soon had the castle road to herself, except for orderlies on motor-cycles and horseback, until a train of automobile wagons loaded with household goods roared by. The full orchestra of war was playing right and left: crashing, high-pitched gun-booms near at hand; low-pitched, reverberating gun-booms in the distance. At the turn of the road in front of the castle she saw the gunners of the batteries that Feller had watched approaching making an emplacement for their guns in a field of carrots that had not yet been harvested. The roots of golden yellow were mixed with the tossing spadefuls of earth.

A shadow like a great cloud in mad flight shot over the earth, and with the gunners she looked up to see a Gray dirigible. Already it was turning homeward; already it had gained its object as a scout. On the fragile platform of the gondola was a man, seemingly a human mite aiming a tiny toy gun. His target was one of the Brown aeroplanes.

"They're in danger of cutting their own envelope! They can't get the angle! The plane is too high!" exclaimed the artillery commander. Both he and his men forgot their work in watching the spectacle of aerial David against aerial Goliath. "If our man lands with his little bomb, oh, my!" he grinned. "That's why he is so high. He's been waiting up there."

"Pray God he will!" exclaimed one of the gunners.

"Look at him volplane—motor at full speed, too!"

The pilot was young Etzel, who, as Lanstron had observed, would charge a church tower if he were bidden. He was taking no risks in missing. His ego had no cosmos except that huge, oblong gas-bag. He drove for it as a hawk goes for its prey. One life for a number of lives—the sacrifice of a single aeroplane for a costly dirigible—that was an exchange in favor of the Browns. And Etzel had taken an oath in his heart—not standing on a cafe table—that he would never let any dirigible that he attacked escape.

"Into it! Making sure! Oh, splen—O!" cried the artillery commander.

A ball of lightning shot forth sheets of flame. Dirigible and plane were hidden in an ugly swirl of yellowish smoke, rolling out into a purple cloud that spread into prismatic mist over the descent of cavorting human bodies and broken machinery and twisted braces, flying pieces of tattered or burning cloth. David has taken Goliath down with him in a death grip.

An aeroplane following the dirigible as a screen, hoping to get home with information if the dirigible were lost, had escaped the sharpshooters in the church tower by flying around the town. However, it ran within range of the automatic and the sharpshooters on top of the castle tower. They failed of the bull's-eye, but their bullets, rimming the target, crippling the motor, and cutting braces, brought the crumpling wings about the helpless pilot. The watching gunners uttered "Ahs!" of horror and triumph as they saw him fall, gliding this way and that, in the agony of slow descent.

"Come, now!" called the artillery commander. "We are wasting precious time."

Entering the grounds of the Galland house, Marta had to pass to one side of the path, now blocked by army wagons and engineers' materials and tools. Soldiers carrying sand-bags were taking the shortest cut, trampling the flowers on their way.

"Do you know whose property this is?" she demanded in a burst of anger.

"Ours—the nation's!" answered one, perspiring freely at his work. "Sorry!" he added on second thought.

Already parts of the first terrace were shoulder-high with sand-bags and one automatic had been set in place, Marta observed as she turned to the veranda. There her mother sat in her favorite chair, hands relaxed as they rested on its arms, while she looked out over the valley in the supertranquillity that comes to some women under a strain—as soldiers who have been on sieges can tell you—that some psychologists interpret one way and some another, none knowing even their own wives.

"Marta, did any of the children come?" Mrs. Galland asked in her usual pleasant tone. So far as she was concerned, the activity on the terrace did not exist. She seemed oblivious of the fact of war.

"Yes, seven."

"And did you hold your session?"

"Yes."

Marta's monosyllables absently answering the questions were expressive of her wonder at her mother. Most girls do not know their mothers much better than psychologists know their wives.

"I am glad of that, Marta. I am glad you went and sorry that I opposed your going, because, Marta, whatever happens one should go regularly about what he considers his duty," said Mrs. Galland. "They have been as considerate as they could, evidently by Colonel Lanstron's orders," she proceeded, nodding toward the industrious engineers. "And they've packed all the paintings and works of art and put them in the cellar, where they will be safe."

The captain of engineers in command, seeing Marta, hurried toward her.

"Miss Galland, isn't it?" he asked. "I have been waiting for you. I—I—well, I found that I could not make the situation clear to your mother."

"He thinks me in my second childhood or out of my head," Mrs. Galland explained with a shade of tartness. "And he has been so polite in trying to conceal his opinion, too," she added with a comprehending smile.

The captain flushed in embarrassment.

"I—I can't speak too strongly," he declared when he had regained his composure. "Though everything seems safe here now, it may not be in an hour. You must go, all of you. This house will be in an inferno as soon as the 53d falls back, and I can't possibly get your mother to appreciate the fact, Miss Galland."

"But I said that I did appreciate it and that the Gallands have been in infernos before—perhaps not as bad as the one that is coming—but, then, the Gallands must keep abreast of the times," replied Mrs. Galland. "I have asked Minna and she prefers to remain. I am glad of that. I am glad now that we kept her, Marta. She is as loyal as my old maid and the butler and the cook were to your grandmother in the last war. Ah, the Gallands had many servants then!"

"This isn't like the old war. This place will be shelled, enfiladed! And you two—" the captain protested desperately.

"I became a Galland when I married," said Mrs. Galland, "and the Galland women have always remained with their property in time of war. Naturally, I shall remain!"

"Miss Galland, it was you—your influence I was counting on to—" The captain turned to Marta in a final appeal.

Mrs. Galland was watching her daughter's face intently.

"We stay!" replied Marta, and the captain saw in the depths of her eyes, a cold blue-black, that further argument was useless.

With a shrug of his shoulders he was turning to go when his lieutenant, hurrying up and pointing to the row of lindens at the edge of the estate, exclaimed:

"If we only had those trees out of the way! They cut the line of our fire! They form cover and protection for the enemy."

"The orders are against it," replied the captain.

"Lanstron may be a great soldier, but—" declared the lieutenant petulantly.

"Cut the lindens if it will help the Browns!" called Mrs. Galland.

"Cut the lindens, mother! Is everything to be destroyed—everything to satisfy the appetite of savagery?" exclaimed Marta. Then, in an abrupt change of mood, inexplicable to the captain and even to herself, she added: "My mother says to cut the lindens. And you will tell us when to go into the house?" Marta asked the captain.

"Yes. There is no danger yet—none until we see the 53d falling back."

What mockery, what uncanny staginess for either her mother or herself to be so calm! Yet, what else were they to do? Were they to scream? Or fall into each other's arms and sob? Marta found a strange pleasure in looking at her garden before it was spattered with blood, as it had been in the last war. It had never seemed more beautiful. There was a sublimity in nature's obliviousness to the thrashing of the air with shells in a gentle breeze that fluttered the petals of the hydrangeas.

The sight of Feller coming along the path of the second terrace brought in sudden vividness to her mind that question which must soon be decided: whether or not she would allow him to remain to carry out his plan. He still had the garden-shears in hand. He was walking with the slow and soft step which was in keeping with the serenity of his occupation. Pausing before the chrysanthemum bed, he touched his hat, and as he awaited her approach he lifted one of the largest blooms that was drooping from its weight on the slender stem.

"They look well, don't you think?" he asked cautiously; and he was very cool, while his eyes had a singular limpidity, speaking better than any words the sadness of his story and the dependence of his hope of regeneration upon her.

"Yes, quite the best they ever have," she replied, inclined to look away from him, conscious of her sensitiveness to his appeal, and yet still looking at him, while she marvelled at him, at herself, at everything.

"Thank you," he said. "You don't know how much that means, how pleased I am."

Now came the sweep of a rising roar from the sky with the command to attention of the rush of a fast express-train past a country railway station. Two Gray dirigibles with their escort of aeroplanes—in formation like that which Mrs. Galland and Feller had seen race along the frontier—were bearing toward the pass over the pass road. One glimpse of the squadron was as a match to Feller's military passion. He swept off his old straw hat and with it all of the gardener's chrysalis. Feller the artillerist gazed aloft in feverish excitement.

"Lanny has them guessing! They're bound to know his plans if it takes all the air craft in the shop!" he exclaimed. "And what are we doing? Yes, what are we doing?" he cried in alarm as his glance swept the sky in front of the squadron, already even with the terrace in its terrific speed.

The automatic and the riflemen in the tower banged away to no purpose, for the aerostatic officers of the Grays had been apprised of the danger in that direction.

"Minutes, seconds count! Where are our high-angle guns?" Feller went on. He was unconsciously gesticulating with all the fervor of hurrying a battery into place to cover an infantry retreat in a crisis. "And they're turning! What's the matter? What are high-angle guns for, anyway, with such targets naked over our lines? Ah-h! Beautiful!"

The central sections of the envelope of the rear dirigible had been torn in shreds; it was buckling. Clouds of blue shrapnel smoke broke around its gondola. A number of field-guns joined forces with a battery of high-angle guns in a havoc that left a drifting derelict that had ceased to exist to Feller's mind immediately it was out of action; for he saw that the remainder of the squadron had completed its loop and was pointing toward the plain.

"And they were low enough to see all they want to know and rising now—evidently already out of reach of our guns—and nothing against them!" he groaned as he saw a clear sky ahead of the big disk and its attending wings, while clenched fists pumping up and down with the movement of his forearms shook his whole body in a palpitation of angry disgust. "Lanny, what's the matter! Lanny, they've beaten you! Eh? What? What—" A long whistle broke from his lips. His body still, transfixed, he cupped his hands over his eyes. "So, that is it! That is your plan, Lanny, old boy!" he shouted. "But if one of their confounded little aviators gets back, he has the story!"

From a great altitude, literally out of the blue of heaven, high over the Gray lines, Marta made out a Brown squadron of dirigibles and planes descending across the track of the Grays.

"Catch them as they come back! Between them and home—between the badger and his hole!" Feller went on explosively; and then, while the two squadrons were approaching at countering angles, he breathed the thoughts that the spectacle aroused in his quick brain: "This is war—war! Talk about your old-fashioned, take-snuff-my-card-sir courage, pray-and-swear courage—what about this? What about old Lanny's chosen men of the air, without boasts or oaths, offering their lives in no wild charge, but coolly, hand on lever, concentratedly, scientifically, in sane, twentieth-century fashion, just to keep our positions secret! Now—now for it!"

The Gray dirigibles, stern on, were little larger than umbrellas and the planes than swallows; the Brown dirigibles, side on, were big sausages and their planes specks. To the eye, this meeting was like that of two small flocks of soaring birds apparently unable to change their course. But imagination could picture the fearful crash of forces, whose wounded would find the succor of no hospital except impact on the earth below.

Marta put her hands over her eyes for only a second, she thought, before she withdrew them in vexation—hadn't she promised herself not to be cowardly?—to see one Brown dirigible and two Brown aeroplanes ascending at a sharp angle above a cloud of smoke to escape the high-angle guns of the Grays.

"We've got them all! No lips survive to tell what the eye saw!" exclaimed Feller, his words bubbling with the joy of water in the sunlight. "As I thought," he continued in professional enthusiasm and discrimination. "We are getting the theory of one feature of the new warfare in practice. It isn't like the popular dream of wiping out armies by dropping bombs as you sail overhead. The force of gravity is against the fliers. You have only to bring them to earth to put them out of action. Plane driven into plane dirigible into dirigible, and an end of bomb-dropping and scouting! War will still be won by the infantry and the guns. Yes, the guns—the new guns! They—"

Feller recalled with a nervous shock flashing through his system that he was a gardener, a gentle old gardener. He put his hat back on a head already bent, while the shoulders, after a pathetic shrug, drew together in the accustomed stoop. His slim fingers slipped under the largest chrysanthemum blossom, his attitude the same as when he had held it up for Marta's inspection before they heard the roar of the Gray squadron's motors.

"I think that we might cut them all now and fill the vases," he suggested, a musical, ingratiating note in his voice. "To-morrow we may not have a chance."

"Yes," she agreed mechanically, her thoughts still dwelling on the collision of the squadrons.

"And some of the finest ones for you to take now," he added, plying the shears as he made his selections. "I'll bring the rest," he concluded when he had gathered a dozen choice blossoms.

His fingers touched hers as the stems changed hands. In his eyes, showing just below the rim of his hat, was the light which she had seen first during the dramatic scene in his sitting-room and the appeal of deference, of suffering, and of the boyish hope of a cadet.



XXI

SHE CHANGES HER MIND

The indefatigable captain of engineers had turned spectator. With high-power binoculars glued to his eyes, he was watching to see if the faint brown line of Dellarme's men were going to hold or break. If it held, he might have hours in which to complete his task; if it broke, he had only minutes.

Marta came up the terrace path from the chrysanthemum bed in time to watch the shroud of shrapnel smoke billowing over the knoll, to visualise another scene in place of the collision of the squadrons, and to note the captain's exultation over Fracasse's repulse.

"How we must have punished them!" he exclaimed to his lieutenant. "How we must have mowed them down! Lanstron certainly knew what he was doing."

"You mean that he knew how we should mow them down?" asked Marta.

Not until she spoke did he realize that she was standing near him.

"Why, naturally! If we hadn't mowed them down his plan would have failed. Mowing them down was the only way to hold them back," he said; and seeing her horror made haste to add: "Miss Galland, now you know what a ghastly business war is. It will be worse here than there."

"Yes," she said blankly. Her colorless cheeks, her drooping underlip convinced him that now, with a little show of masculine authority, he would gain his point.

"You and your mother must go!" he said firmly.

This was the very thing to whip her thoughts back from the knoll. He was thunderstruck at the transformation: hot color in her cheeks, eyes aflame, lips curving around a whirlwind of words.

"You name the very reason why I wish to stay. Why do you want to save the women? Why shouldn't they bear their share? Why don't you want them to see men mowed down? Is it because you are ashamed of your profession? Why, I ask?"

The problem of dealing with an angry woman breaking a shell fire of questions over his head had not been ready-solved in the captain's curriculum like other professional problems, nor was it mentioned in the official instructions about the defences of the Galland house. He aimed to smile soothingly in the helplessness of man in presence of feminine fury.

"It is an old custom," he was saying, but she had turned away.

"Picking flowers! What mockery! Lanny's plan—mow them down! mow them down! mow them down!" she went on, more to herself than to him, as she dropped the chrysanthemums on the veranda table.

In a fire of resolution she hastened back down the terrace steps. The Grays and the Browns were fighting in their way for their causes; she must fight in her way for hers. Stopping before Feller, she seemed taller than her usual self and quivering with impatience.

"Have you connected the wire to the telephone yet?" she asked abruptly.

"No, not yet," he answered.

"Then please come with me to the tower!"

Whatever his fears, he held them within the serene bounds of the gardener's personality, while his covert glimpse of her warned him against the mistake of trying to dam the current of a passion running so strong.

"Certainly, Miss Galland," he said agreeably, quite as if there were nothing unusual in her attitude. No word passed between them as he kept pace with her rapid gait along the path, but out of the corner of his eye he surveyed in measuring admiration and curiosity the straight line of nose and forehead under its heavy crown of hair, with a few detached and riotous tendrils.

"Bring a lantern!" she said, as they entered his sitting-room, in a way that left no excuse for refusal.

When he had brought the lantern she took it from his hand and led the way into the tunnel.

"Please make the connection so that I can speak to Lanny!" she instructed him after she had pressed the button and the panel door of the telephone recess flew open.

For an instant he hesitated; then curiosity and the unremitting authority of her tone had their way. He dropped to his knees, ran his fingers into an aperture between two stones and made a jointure of two wire ends.

"All ready!" he said, and eagerly. What a delightfully spirited rage she was in! And what the devil was she going to do, anyway?

As she took the receiver from the hook she heard an electric bell at the other end of the line, but no "Hello!"

"The bell means that Lanny will be called if he is there. No one except him is to talk over this telephone," Feller explained softly.

Marta waited for some time before she heard a familiar, calm voice, with a faint echo of irritation over being interrupted in the midst of pressing duties.

"Well, Gustave, old boy, it can't be that you are in touch with Westerling yet?"

"It is I—Marta!" and she came abruptly to the flaming interrogation that had brought her there. "I want to ask a question. I want a clear answer—I want everything clear! If Feller's plan succeeds it means that you will know where the Grays are going to attack?"

"Yes; why, yes, Marta!"

"So that you can mow them down?"

"That is one way of putting it—yes."

"If I keep your secret—if I let the telephone remain, I am an accomplice! I shall not be that—not to any kind of murder! I shall not let the telephone remain!"

"As you will, Marta," he replied. "But anything that leads to victory means less slaughter in the end. For we have tested our army well enough to know that only when it is decimated will it ever retreat from its main line of defence."

"The old argument!" she answered bitterly.

"As you will, Marta! Only, Marta—I plead with you—please, please leave the house!" he begged passionately.

Again that request, which was acid to the raw spot of her anger! Again that assumption that she must desert her own home because uninvited guests would make it the theatre of their quarrel! How clear and unassailable her reply in the purview of her distraught logic!

"Why particularly care for one life when you deal in lives by the wholesale?" she demanded. "Why think of my life when you are taking other lives every minute?"

"Because I am human, not just a machine! Because yours is the one life of all to me—because I love you!" Feller, getting only one side of the talk, cautiously watching her as he held up the lantern to throw her face more clearly in relief, saw her start and caught the sound of a quick indrawing of breath between her lips, while something electric quivered through her frame. Then, as one who has twinged from a pin-prick of distraction which she will not permit to waive her from a white-heat purpose, she exclaimed, in rapid, stabbing, desperate sentences:

"That! That now! After what I said to you a week ago! That in the midst of your mowing! No, no, no!" She drove the receiver down on the hook and blazed out to Feller: "Now you will tear out the 'phone'"

He steadied himself against the wall, covering his face with his hands, and for the first time in her life she heard a man sob.

"My one chance—my last chance—gone!" he said brokenly. "The chance for me to redeem myself, so that I might again look at the flag without shame, taken from me in the name of mercy, when, by helping to bring victory and shorten the war, I might have saved thousands of lives!" he proceeded dismally.

"The old argument! Lanny has just used it!" said Marta. But coming from a man sobbing it sounded differently. His hands fell away from his face as if they were a dead weight. She saw him a wreck of a human being with only his eyes alive, regarding her in harrowing wonder and reproach.

"When I was a gardener eating at the kitchen table, playing the part of a spy—I who was honor man at the military school—I who had a conscience that sent me back from the free life on the plains to try to atone—when I hoped to do this thing in order to prove that I was fit to die if not to live——"

He was as a man pitting his last grain of strength against overwhelming odds. There were long, poignant pauses between his sentences as he seemed to strive for coherence.

"—in order to prove it for my country, for Lanny, and for you who have been so kind to me!" he concluded, another dry sob shaking him.

His chin dropped to his breast. Even the spark in his eyes flickered out. In the feeble lantern light that deepened the shadows of his face he was indescribably pitiful. She could not look away from him. There was something infectious about his misery that compelled her to feel with his nerves.

"Please," he pleaded faintly—"please leave me to myself. I will tear out the telephone—trust me—only I wish to be alone. I am uncertain—I see only dark!"

He sank lower against the wall, his head fell forward, though not so far but he could see her from under his eyebrows. She started as she had at the telephone, her breath came in the same sweep between her lips, and he looked for a passionate refusal; but it did not come. She seemed in some spell of recollection or projection of thought. A lustrous veil was over her eyes. She was not looking at him or at anything in the range of her vision. She shuddered and abruptly seized her left wrist with her right hand, as Lanstron had in the arbor, which had brought her cry of "I'm hurting you!" In this inscrutable attitude she was silent for a time.

"Let it remain—it means so much to you!" she said wildly, and hurried past him still clasping her wrist.

He stared into the darkness that closed around her. With the last sound of her footsteps he became another Gustave Feller, who, all mercurial vivacity, clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth with a "La, la, la!" as his hand shot out for the receiver. There it paused, and still another idea animated still another Gustave Feller.

"Why not tear out the telephone—why not?" he mused. "Why didn't I agree to her plan? Why can't I ever carry more than one thing in mind at once? I forgot that we were at war. I forget that I am already at the front. I have skill! God knows, I ought to have courage! Volunteers who have both are always welcome in war. Any number of gunners will be killed! When an artillery colonel saw what I could do he would take me on without further questioning. Then I should not be a spy, shuffling and whining, but bang-bang-bang on the target!"

In imagination he now had a gun. His hand made a movement of manipulation, head bent, eye sighting.

"How do you like that? You will like this one less! And here's another—but, no, no!" He dropped against the wall again; he drove his nails into his palms in a sort of castigation. "I am the same as a soldier now—a soldier assigned to a definite duty for my flag. I should break my word of honor—a soldier's word of honor! No, not that again!"

He snatched down the receiver to make sure that temptation did not reappear in too luring a guise, and still another Gustave Feller was in the ascendant.

"Didn't I say to trust it to me, Lanny?" he called merrily. "Miss Galland consents!"

"She does? Good! Good for you, Gustave!"

"Her second thought," Feller rejoined. "And, Lanny," he proceeded in boyish enthusiasm, using a slang word of military school days, "it was bulludgeous the way we brought down their planes and dirigibles! How I ache to be in it when the guns are so busy! With batteries back of the house and an automatic in the yard, things seem very homelike. I—"

"Gustave," interrupted Lanstron, "we all have our weaknesses, and perhaps yours is to play a part. So keep away from the fight and don't think of the guns!"

"I will, I swear!" Feller answered fervently. "One thought, one duty! I'll 'phone you when the house is taken, and if you don't hear from me again, why, you'll know the plan has failed and I'm a prisoner. But, trust me, Lanny! Trust me—for my flag and my country against the invader!"

"Against the invader—that justifies all! And get Miss Galland out of it. You seem to have influence with her. Get her out of it!"

"Trust me!"

"Bless you, and God with you!"

"One thought, one duty!" repeated Feller with the devoutness of a monk trying to forget everything except his aves as he started toward the stairway. "I wonder if we still hold the knoll!" he mused, extinguishing the lantern. "We do! we do!" he cried when he was in the doorway. "Oh, this is life!" he added after a deep-drawn breath, watching the little clouds of shrapnel smoke here and there along the base of the range.



XXII

FLOWERS FOR THE WOUNDED

Was there nothing for Marta to do? Could she only look on in a fever of restlessness while action roared around her? On the way from the tower to the house the sight of several automobile ambulances in the road at the foot of the garden stilled the throbs of distraction in her temples with an answer. The wounded! They were already coming in from the field. She hurried down the terrace steps. The major surgeon in charge, surprised to find any woman in the vicinity, was about to tell her so automatically; then, in view of her intensity, he waited for her to speak.

"You will let us do something for them?" Marta asked. "We will make them some hot soup."

He was immediately businesslike. No less than Dellarme or Fracasse or Lanstron or Westerling, he had been preparing throughout his professional career for this hour. The detail of caring for the men who were down had been worked out no less systematically than that of wounding them.

"Thank you, no! We don't want to waste time," he replied. "We must get them away with all speed so that the ambulances may return promptly. It's only a fifteen-minute run to the hospital, where every comfort and appliance are ready and where they will be given the right things to eat."

"Then we will give them some wine!" Marta persisted.

"Not if we can prevent it! Not to start hemorrhages! The field doctors have brandy for use when advisable, and there is brandy with all the ambulances."

Clearly, volunteer service was not wanted. There was no room at the immediate front for Florence Nightingales in the modern machine of war.

"Then water?"

The major surgeon aimed to be patient to an earnest, attractive young woman.

"We have sterilized water—we have everything," he explained. "If we hadn't at this early stage I ought to be serving an apprenticeship in a village apothecary shop. Anything that means confusion, delay, unnecessary excitement is bad and unmerciful."

Marta was not yet at the end of her resources. The recollection of the dying private who had asked her mother for a rose in the last war flashed into mind.

"You haven't flowers! They won't do any harm, even if they aren't sterilized. The wounded like flowers, don't they? Don't you like flowers? Look! We've millions!"

"Yes, I do. They do. A good idea. Bring all the flowers you want to."

The major surgeon's smile to Marta was not altogether on account of her suggestion. "It ought to help anybody who was ever wounded anywhere in the world to have you give him a flower!" he was thinking.

She ran for an armful of blossoms and was back before the arrival of the first wounded man who preceded the stretchers on foot. He was holding up a hand bound in a white first-aid bandage which had a red spot in the centre. Those hit in hand or arm, if the surgeon's glance justified it, were sent on up the road to a point a mile distant, where transportation in requisitioned vehicles was provided. These men were triumphant in their cheerfulness. They were alive; they had done their duty, and they had the proof of it in the coming souvenirs of scars.

Some of the forms on stretchers had peaceful faces in unconsciousness of their condition. Others had a look of wonder, of pain, of apprehension in their consciousness that death might be near. The single word "Shrapnel!" by a hospital-corps corporal told the story of crushed or lacerated features, in explanation of a white cloth covering a head with body uninjured.

Feller, strolling out into the garden under the spell of watching shell bursts, saw what Marta was doing. With the same feeling of relief at opportunity for action that she had felt, he hastened to assist her, bringing flowers by the basketful and pausing to watch her distribute them—watching her rather than the wounded and enjoying incidental thrills at examples of the efficiency of artillery fire.

"The guns—the guns are going to play a great part!" he thought. "These rapid-firers will recover all the artillery's prestige of Napoleon's time!"

Many of the wounded themselves looked at Marta even more than at the flowers. It was good to see the face of a woman, her eyes limpid with sympathy, and it was not what she said but the way she spoke that brought smiles in response to hers. For she was no solemn ministering angel, but high-spirited, cheery, of the sort that the major surgeon would have chosen to distribute flowers to the men. Every remark of the victims of war made its distinct and indelible impression on the gelatine of her mind.

"I like my blue aster better than that yellow weed of yours, Tom!"

"You didn't know Ed Schmidt got it? Yes, he was right next me in the line."

"Say, did you notice Dellarme's smile? It was wonderful."

"And old Bert Stransky! I heard him whistling the wedding march as he fired."

"Miss, I'll keep this flower forever!"

"They say Billy Lister will live—his cheek was shot away!"

"Once we got going I didn't mind. It seemed as if I'd been fighting for years!"

"Hole no bigger than a lead-pencil. I'll be back in a week!"

"Yes; don't these little bullets make neat little holes?"

"We certainly gave them a surprise when they came up the hill! I wonder if we missed the fellow that jumped into the shell crater!"

"Our company got it worst!"

"Not any worse than ours, I'll wager!"

"Oh—oh—can't you go easier? Oh-h-h—" the groan ending in a clenching of the teeth.

"Hello, Jake! You here, too, and going in my automobile? And we've both got lower berths!"

"Sh-h! That poor chap's dying!"

Worst of all to Marta was the case of a shrapnel fracture of the cranium, with the resulting delirium, in which the sufferer's incoherence included memories of childhood scenes, moments on the firing-line, calls for his mother, and prayers to be put out of misery. A prod of the hypodermic from the major surgeon, and "On the operating-table in fifteen minutes" was the answer to Marta's question if the poor fellow would live.

Until dark, in groups, at intervals, and again singly, the wounded were coming in from a brigade front in the region where the rifles were crackling and the shrapnel clouds were hanging prettily over the hills; and stretchers were being slipped into place in the ambulances, while Marta kept at her post.

"We shan't have much more to do at this station," said the major surgeon when a plodding section of infantry in retreat arrived.



XXIII

STRANSKY FIGHTS ALONE

Every unit engrossed in his own work! Every man taught how a weak link may break a chain and realizing himself as a link and only a link! The captain of engineers forgot Marta's existence as an error of his subordinates caught his eye, and he went to caution the axemen to cut closer to the ground, as stumps gave cover for riflemen. For the time being he had no more interest in the knoll than in the wreckage of dirigibles which were down and out of the fight.

After all, the knoll was only a single point on the vast staff map—only one of many points of a struggle whose progress was bulletined through the siftings of regimental, brigade, division, and corps headquarters in net results to the staff. Partow and Lanstron overlooked all. Their knowledge made the vast map live under their eyes. But our concern is with the story of two regiments, and particularly of two companies, and that is story enough. If you would grasp the whole, multiply the conflict on the knoll by ten thousand.

There had been the engrossment of transcendent emotion in repelling the charge. What followed was like some grim and passionless trance with triggers ticking off the slow-passing minutes. Dellarme aimed to keep down the fusillade from Fracasse's trench and yet not to neglect the fair targets of the reserves advancing by rushes to the support of the 128th. Reinforced, the gray streak at the bottom of the slope poured in a heavier fire. Above the steady crackle of bullets sent and the whistle of bullets received rose the cry of "Doctor! Doctor!" which meant each time that another Brown rifle had been silenced. The litter bearers, hard pressed to remove the wounded, left the dead. Already death was a familiar sight—an article of exchange in which Dellarme's men dealt freely. The man at Stransky's side had been killed outright. He lay face down on his rifle stock. His cap had fallen off. Stransky put it back on the man's head, and the example was followed in other cases. It was a good idea to keep up a show of a full line of caps to the enemy.

Suddenly, as by command, the fire from the base of the knoll ceased altogether. Dellarme understood at once what this meant—the next step in the course of a systematic, irresistible approach by superior numbers. It was to allow the ground scouts to advance. Individual gray spots detaching themselves from the gray streak began to crawl upward in search of dead spaces where the contour of the ground would furnish some protection from the blaze of bullets from the crest.

"Over their heads! Don't try to hit them!" Dellarme passed the word.

"That's it! Spare one to get a dozen!" said Stransky, grinning in ready comprehension. He seemed to be grinning every time that Dellarme looked in that direction. He was plainly enjoying himself. His restless nature had found sport to its taste.

The creeping scouts must have signalled back good news, for groups began crawling slowly after them.

"Over their heads! Encourage them!" Dellarme commanded.

After they had advanced two or three hundred yards they stopped, shoulders and hands exposed in silhouette, and began to work feverishly with their spades.

"Now let them have it!"

"Oh, beautiful!" cried Stransky. "That baby captain of ours has some brains, after all! We'll get them now and we'll get them when they run!"

But they did not run. Unfalteringly they took their punishment while they turned over the protecting sod in the midst of their own dead and wounded. In a few minutes they had dropped spades for rifles, and other sections either crawled or ran forward precipitately and fell to the task of joining the isolated beginnings into a single trench.

Again Dellarme looked toward regimental headquarters, his fixed, cheery smile not wholly masking the appeal in his eyes. The Grays had only two or three hundred yards to go when they should make their next charge in order to reach the crest. But his men had fifteen hundred to go in the valley before they were out of range. After their brave resistance facing the enemy they would receive a hail of bullets in their backs. This was the time to withdraw if there were to be assurance of a safe retreat. But there was no signal. Until there was, he must remain.

The trench grew; the day wore on. Two rifles to one were now playing against his devoted company, which had had neither food nor drink since early morning. As he scanned his thinning line he saw a look of bloodlessness and hopelessness gathering on the set faces of which he had grown so fond during this ordeal. Some of the men were crouching too much for effective aim.

"See that you fire low! Keep your heads up!" he called. "For your homes, your country, and your God! Pass the word along!"

Parched throat after parched throat repeated the message hoarsely and leaden shoulders raised a trifle and dust-matted eyelashes narrowed sharply on the sights.

"For the man in us!" growled Stransky. "For the favor of nature at birth that gave us the right to wear trousers instead of skirts! For the joy of hell, give them hell!"

"For our homes! For the man in us!" they repeated, swallowing the words as if they had the taste of a stimulant. But Dellarme knew that it would not take much to precipitate a break. He himself felt that he had been on that knoll half a lifetime. He looked at his watch and it was five o'clock. For seven hours they had held on. The Grays' trench was complete the breadth of the slope; more reserves were coming up. The brigade commander of the Grays was going to make sure that the next charge succeeded.

At last Dellarme's glance toward regimental headquarters showed the flag that was the signal for withdrawal. Could he accomplish it? The first lieutenant, with a shattered arm, had gone on a litter. The old sergeant was dead, a victim of the colonial wars. Used to fighting savage enemies, he had been too eager in exposing himself to a civilized foe. He had been shot through the throat.

"Men of the first section," Dellarme called, "you will slip out of line with the greatest care not to let the enemy know that you are going!"

"Going—going! Careful! Men of the first section going!" the parched throats repeated in a thrilling whisper.

"Those who remain keep increasing their fire!" called Dellarme again. "Cover the whole breadth of the trench!"

Every fourth man wormed himself backward on his stomach until he was below the sky-line, when his stiffened limbs brought him to his feet and he started on a dead run down into the valley and toward a cut behind another knoll across the road from the Galland house.

"Tom Fragini, with your corporal dead I put you in charge of the first section! What are you waiting for, Corporal Fragini?"

Tom was bending over Grandfather Fragini, who had been forgotten by everybody in the ordeal. The old man was lying where he had fallen after the first burst of shrapnel.

"Can't go! Got a game leg!" said grandfather, pointing to a swollen ankle that had been bruised by a piece of shrapnel jacket that had lost most of its velocity before striking him. "You do your duty and leave me alone. I ain't a fighting man any more. I done my work when I steadied you young fellows."

"Yes, go on, Fragini," said Dellarme. "Attend to your men. Everybody in his place. We'll get the old man away on a litter."

"Yes, you go or you ain't any grandson of mine!" shouted the old man in a high-pitched voice. "Just been promoted, too! You'll be up for insubordination in a minute, you young whelp!"

Dellarme meant to look after grandfather, but his attention was engrossed in seeing that his men withdrew cautiously, for every minute that he was able to delay the enemy's charge was vital. He himself picked up a rifle in order to increase the volume of fire when the third section was starting. As the fourth and last section drew off he uttered his first cry of triumph of the day as his final look revealed the Grays still in place. But they would not wait long once all fire from the knoll had ceased. Stransky, who was in the fourth section, remained to give a parting shot.

"Good-by, d—— you!" he called to the Grays. "You'll hear more from me later!"

Then Dellarme saw that grandfather had not yet been carried away and no litters remained. What was to be done? Grandfather was prompt with his own view.

"Just leave me behind. I've done my work, I tell you!" he declared.

"Can't lose you, grandpop!" said Stransky.

Quickly shifting his pack to the ground, he squatted with his back to the old man.

"I ain't going to—and you're a traitor, anyway; that's what you are!"

"No back talk! No politics in this!" Stransky replied. "Get up! You carry your skin and I'll carry your bones. Get up quick!"

With Dellarme's authoritative assistance grandfather mounted. Then Dellarme put Stransky's pack on his own back.

"Let me carry your rifle, too," he said to Stransky as they started.

"Not much!" answered Stransky. "I was just married to that rifle this morning. We're on our honeymoon trip and getting fairly well acquainted, and expect shortly to settle down to a busy domestic life."

He set off at a lope and gained the rear of the section in his first burst of speed. As the other men got their second wind, however, Stransky began to puff and they soon drew away from him.

"Put me down! I ain't going to depend on any traitor that insulted the flag!" protested grandfather.

"That's the way! Call out to me now and then so I'll know you're there," said Stransky. "You're so light I mightn't know it if you fell off."

Dellarme did not think it right to expose the last section by asking it to delay. Shepherd of his flock and miser of his pieces of gold, now that their work was done the one thing he wanted in the world was that they should escape without further punishment. Already the van of the first section was disappearing into the cut in safety. But the fourth section, which had held to the last, had yet a thousand yards to go over a path bare of cover except a single small bush. At any moment he expected to hear a cheer from the knoll, and what would follow the cheer he knew only too well. Yet he tarried with Stransky out of one man's impulse not to desert another in danger. At the same time he was wroth with the old man for having made such a nuisance of himself.

"What are you waiting for?" Stransky demanded of Dellarme.

"I like good company," answered Dellarme cheerfully.

"Compliment for you, grandfather!" said Stransky.

"Put me down!" screamed grandfather.

"Still there, eh? Thanks, grandpop!" said Stransky, turning on Dellarme. "Can't you run any faster than that, captain? Your place is with your men, sir. If you got wounded I'd have to carry you, too. Your company's gaining on you every minute. Hurry up!"

From the peremptory way that he spoke, Dellarme might have been the private and Stransky the officer.

"Right!" said Dellarme in face of such unanswerable military logic, and broke into a run.

Stransky adapted himself to a pace which he thought he could maintain, and plodded on, eyes on the bush as a half-way point. After a while he heard a mighty hurrah, which was cut short abruptly; then spits of dust about their feet hastened the steps of the last section, which was near the cut. He saw men drop out of line to make a cradle of their arms for comrades who had been hit; and these finally passed out of danger with their burdens.

"No flock in sight! It's the turn of the individual birds!" thought Stransky, and heard a familiar sound about his ears.

"Bullets!" exclaimed grandfather. "Don't whistle like they used to. They kind of crack and sizzle now. Maybe if they hit me I'll stop 'em, and that'll save you."

"That's so," replied Stransky glumly, realizing that he was running with a human shield on his back. "But they'll go right through him he's so thin," he thought in relief. The worst of it was that he had to receive without sending, which made him boil with rage. He wished that the bush had legs so it could run toward him; he half believed that it had and was retreating. "They're shooting right at us, and that's in our favor. It's hard to get the bull's-eye at that range," he assured grandfather.

Whish-whish-whish! Enough pellets were singing by to have torn away the rim of the target, yet none got the centre before Stransky dropped behind the bush. Blessed bush! Back of it was a bowlder. Thrice-blessed bowlder! It protected grandfather as securely as the armor of a battleship.

"We are having a noisy time," remarked Stransky as two or three of the leaves fell. "Intelligent thieves! How did you guess we were here?" and he put his big thumb to his big nose.

"But they didn't know about the bowlder!" said the old man with a senile giggle. "Say, I didn't mean it when I called you a traitor—not after the fight! I just said that to make you mad so you'd put me down and we shouldn't lose a good fighting man trying to save an old bag of bones like me. You ain't no traitor! You're a patriot!"

"More politics, when I'm simply full of cussedness!" grumbled Stransky. "Not having any home, I'm fighting to save the other fellows' homes, principally because I was married this morning by a shrapnel-shell to a lady that understands me perfectly. Say, shall we give them a few?" he asked with a squint down the bridge of his nose as he took up his rifle.

"Yes, give 'em a few!" grandfather urged when they ought to have remained quiet, as the firing was dying down. It was not worth while to shoot at a bush, and after all the torrent of lead that they had poured into the bush the Grays had concluded that nothing behind it could remain alive.

Stransky aimed at a head and shoulder on the sky-line, which he took for those of an officer, and was accurate enough to make the head and shoulders duck and to get a swarm of bullets in return.

"Children, why will you waste your country's ammunition?" said Stransky, firing again.

"That's the way to talk!" said grandfather approvingly. "Nothing like a little gayety and ginger in war."

Now a Brown battery whose fire could be spared from other work dropped a few shells on the knoll and so occupied the attention of the 128th that it had no time to attend to occasional bullets from snipers.

"Think we're no account! Shall we charge them now we've got the support of the guns?" chuckled Stransky.

"You Hussar, you!" Grandfather gave Stransky a slap on the back. "With a thousand like you we could charge me whole army, if the general would let us!"

"But he wouldn't let us," replied Stransky. "I could even tell you why."

With the shadows gathering he slipped back to grandfather's side, and after it was quite dark he said that it was time for the old Hussar to mount his fiery steed. Grandfather's hands slipped from around Stransky's neck at the first trial; with the next, Stransky took the bony fingers in his grip and held them clasped on his chest with one hand, proceeding as quietly as he could, for he had an idea that the Grays were already moving down from the knoll under cover of night.

"Yes, sir, I'm glad I came!" said grandfather faintly and meanderingly. "I wasn't sure about Tom—all this new-fangled education and these uniforms without any color in 'em. But I saw him firing away steady as a rock; yes, sir! I was in it, too, under fire! It made my heart thump-thump like the old days. And we're going to hold 'em—we're going to teach the land-sharks—I'm very happy—made my heart thump so—kind of tired me—"

The old man's voice died away into silence. His knees weakened their grip and his legs swung pendulum-like with Stransky's steps.

"What about me for a sleeping-car!" thought Stransky. "But he's certainly harder to carry."

Yet it pleased Stransky not to waken his passenger until they reached the station his ticket called for. Entering the cut, he was halted by the challenging cry of "Who goes there?" in his own tongue.

"Stransky of the Reds!" he roared back. "Stransky, private of the 53d—Stransky and his bride and grandfather!"

"All right, Bert!" was the answer. "Hurrah for you! I'd know your old bull voice out of a thousand."

Even this did not arouse grandfather. Stransky trudged on past the sentry, across a road and up three series of steps of a garden terrace, through a breach in a breastwork of sand-bags, and was again at home—the only home he knew—among the comrades of his company. Most of them had fallen asleep on the ground after finishing their rations, logs of men in animal exhaustion. Some of those awake were too weary to give more than a nod and smile and an exclamation of delight. They had witnessed too much horror that day to be excited over a soldier with an old man on his back. A few of the others, including Tom Fragini, gathered around the pair.

"We've arrived, grandfather!" said Stransky, squatting. There was no answer. "He certainly sleeps sound. I wonder if—."

"Yes," said Dellarme, who with Tom eased the fall of the limp body.

The thumping of an old man's heart with the youth of a Hussar had been too much for it.

"He was game!" said Stransky. "There isn't much in this world except to be game, I've concluded; and you can't be so old or so poor or so big-nosed and wall-eyed that you can't be game."

Marta, coming out on the veranda, had not heard his remark, but she had seen a leonine sort of private bearing an old man on his back and had guessed that he had remained behind to save a life when every man in uniform had been engaged in taking life.

"You are tired! You are hungry!" she said with urgent gentleness. "Come in!"

He followed her into the house and dropped on a leather chair before a shining table in a room panelled with oak, wondering at her and at himself. No woman of Marta's world had ever spoken in that way to him. But it was good to sit down. Then a maid with a sad, winsome face and tender eyes brought him wine and bread and cold meat and jam. He gulped down a glassful of the wine; he ate with great mouthfuls in the ravenous call of healthy, exhausted tissues, while the maid stood by to cut more bread.

"When it comes to eating after fighting—"

He looked up when the first pangs of hunger were assuaged. Enormous, broad-shouldered, physical, his cheeks flushed with the wine, his eyes opened wide and brilliant with the fire that was in his nature—eyes that spoke the red business of anarchy and war.

"Say, but you're pretty!"

Springing up, he caught her hand and made to kiss her in the brashness of impulse. Minna struck him a stinging blow in the face. He received it as a mastiff would receive a bite from a pup, and she stood her ground, her eyes challenging his fearlessly.

"So you are like that!" he said thoughtfully. "It was a good one, and you meant it, too."

"Decidedly!" she answered. "There's more where that came from!"

"As I was telling the Grays this afternoon! Good for you!" He sat down again composedly, while she glared at him. "I'm still hungry. I've had wine enough; but would you cut me another slice of bread?"

She cut another slice and he covered it generously with jam. Then little Clarissa Eileen entered and pressed against her mother's skirts, subjecting Stransky to childhood's scrutiny. He waved a finger at her and grinned and drew his eyes together in a squint at the bridge of his nose, making a funny face that brought a laugh.

"Your child?" Stransky asked Minna.

"Yes."

"Where's her father? Away fighting?"

"I don't know where he is!"

"Oh!" he mused. "Was that blow for him at the same time as for me?" he pursued thoughtfully.

"Yes, for all of your kind."

"M-m-m!" came from between his lips as he rose. "Would you mind holding out your hand?" he asked with a gentleness singularly out of keeping with his rough aspect.

"Why?" she demanded.

"I've never studied any books of etiquette of polite society, and I am a poor sort at making speeches, anyhow. But I want to kiss a good woman's hand by way of apology. I never kissed one in my life, but I'm getting a lot of new experiences to-day. Will you?"

She held out her hand at arm's length and flushed slightly as he pressed his lips to it.

"You certainly do cut thick slices of bread," he said, smiling. "And you certainly are pretty," he added, passing out of the door as jauntily as if he were ready for another fight and just in time to see the colonel of the regiment come around the house. He stood at the salute, half proudly, half defiantly, but in nowise humbly.

"Well, Major Dellarme!" was the colonel's greeting of the company commander.

"Major?" exclaimed Dellarme.

"Yes. Partow has the power. Four of the aviators have iron crosses already and promotion, too; and you are a major. Company G got into a mess and the whole regiment would have been in one unless you held on. So I let you stay. It all came out right, as Lanstron planned—right so far. But your losses have been heavy and here you are in the thick of it again. Your company may change places with Company E, which has had a relatively easy time."

"No, sir; we would prefer to stay," Dellarme answered quietly.

"Good! Then you will take this battalion and I'll transfer Groller to Alvery's Bad loss, Alvery—shrapnel. The artillery has been doing ugly work, but that is all in favor of the defensive. If we can hold them on this line till to-morrow noon, it's all we want for the present," he concluded.

"We'll hold them! Don't worry!" put in Stransky.

If a private had spoken to a colonel in this fashion at drill, without being spoken to, it would have been a glaring breach of military etiquette. Now that they were at war it was different. Real comradeship between officer and man begins with war.

"We shall, eh?" chuckled the colonel. "You look big enough to hold anything, young man! Here! Isn't this the fellow that Lanstron got off?"

"Yes, sir," answered Dellarme.

"Well, was Lanstron right?"

"Yes, sir."

"Wonderful man, Lanstron!"

"He knows just' a little too much!" Stransky half growled.



XXIV

THE MAKING OF A HERO

A digression, this, about pale, little Peterkin, the valet's son, whom we left nibbling a biscuit in perfect security after his leap in mortal terror. When Fracasse's men rose from their trench for the final charge and found that the enemy had gone, Peterkin, hearing their cheer and the thunderous tread of their feet, dared to look above the edge of the shell crater. Here was his company coming and he not in the ranks where he belonged. Of course he ought to have gone back with them when they went; whatever they did he ought to do. This was the only safe way for one of his incurable stupidity, as the drill sergeant had told him repeatedly.

He recognized the stocky butcher's son and other familiar figures among his comrades. Their legs, unlike his, had not been paralyzed with fright; they had been able to run. He was in an absolute minority of one, which he knew, from the experience of his twenty years of life and his inheritance as a valet's son, meant that he was utterly in the wrong. In a minute they would be sweeping down on him. They would be jeering him and calling him a rabbit or something worse for hiding in the ground.

Fright prompted him to a fresh impulse. Picking up his rifle, which he had not touched since his leap, he faced toward the now unoccupied crest of the knoll and commenced firing. Meanwhile, Fracasse's men had reached the point where their first charge had broken, marked by a line of bodies, including that of the manufacturer's son, who had thought that war would be beneficial as a deterrent to strikes and an impetus to industry, lying with his head on his arm, his neck twisted, and the whites of his eyes idled skyward. In a spasm of sickening realization of how impossible it was for those who had not run back to survive between two lines of fire, they heard a shot from the ground at their feet and beheld the runt of the company in the act of making war single-handed. It was a miracle! It was like the dead coming to life!

"Peterkin?"

"Yes, Peterkin!"

"With a whole skin!"

Probably it was a great mistake for him to have a whole skin, thought Peterkin. He scrambled to his feet and kept pace with the others, hoping that he would be overlooked in the ranks.

"I'm so glad! Dear little Peterkin!" said Hugo Mallin, who was at Peterkin's side.

His knowledge of Hugo's gentle nature convinced Peterkin that Hugo was trying to soften the forthcoming reprimand.

When their feet at last actually stood on the knoll which had dealt death to their ranks and they saw the brown figures of the enemy that had driven them back in full flight, the men of the 128th felt the thrill of triumph won in the face of bullets. This is a thrill by itself, primitive and masculine, that calls the imagination of men to war for war's sake. Pilzer, the butcher's son, wanted to kill for the sheer joy and revenge of killing. He rejoiced in the dead and the blood spots that, as clearly as the trench itself, marked the line that Dellarme's men had occupied along the crest of the knoll. It pleased him to use one of the bodies as a rest for his rifle, while he laid his sight in ecstasy on the large target of two men of the last section who were bringing off one of the wounded, and he swore when they got away.