DAVE read the line he had just written in his diary, reversed the pencil to erase, hesitated, and let the words stand. From his bunk by the loft-window he gazed thoughtfully down across the sunlit road to the window of the bureau, where Malleson sat reading. The confident, incisive profile of the Lieutenant stood out in sharp relief against the white curtain, which had been draped back over the chair.

"Change the clothes and put some gray in his hair and he'd be his father," pondered Dave sadly, "and I never could talk to him."

Homesickness surged over him. He wanted to forget the voices of his new companions, their friendly faces, their uniforms. At the same time he envied them. How long would it take him to acquire such untroubled, tolerant acquiescence? He glanced about the loft: men sprawled on stretchers, sleeping; fat, be-spectacled Talbot, the Section clerk, propped against a pile of blankets, reading and contentedly puffing his pipe; Sergeant Douglas heating water over a solidified-alcohol fire, to make "George Washington Coffee"; Swazey telling stories to a group in the corner; others playing poker in a cleared space in the center of the floor . . . . Not one of these fellows seemed to think beyond the present moment or to worry about things past.

Suddenly arose a shrieking of brakes, followed by a frenzied flutter and squawking from the chickens on the road. The old basket-weaver looked up from her work; her hands remained motionless. A low blue automobile had appeared as if by magic before the door of the bureau.

"Come here! Look!" cried Dave excitedly.

They watched a small man leave the car and enter the house. He moved with a sort of deadly lightness, the vivid blue of his uniform contrasting oddly with his gray, accipitrine face.

"The Old Man!" breathed Swazey.

Dave looked up inquiringly.

"The Old Man---the Médecin Divisionnaire, head of the Divisional medical service," explained Sergeant Douglas. "This means business."

In barely five minutes the Old Man reappeared, snapped a quick answering salute to Malleson, leaped to the seat beside his chauffeur, and the blue car roared away.

It was characteristic of the inverse logic of war that here in this place of infinite leisure a command, when it finally arrived, called for instantaneous action. By midnight the baggage was packed in the cars, and the men had flopped on their stretchers for a few hours' sleep. At dawn the convoy aligned, each driver in his place, the motors warm; The motorcycle, with Sergeant Douglas in the side-car, chugged up and down the long column; the cooks gave a last inspection to the Ark of the Covenant, to make sure its various trappings were anchored; an occasional deep, rattling thunder from the Packard truck signified that the mechanics were growing impatient.

"What are we waiting for?" queried the mild, clerical Talbot, wiping the mist from his glasses, which instantly clouded again.

"What d' ye s'pose ?" retorted Swazey. "What do we always wait for? I pauses for a reply and I gets it unanimous---we wait for Gervais, the royal Frog bastard, to finish his breakfast!"

"Sh! Swazey," soothed Talbot, who rode as orderly, "remember Jean of Arc. Vive Liberté, Égalité, et les haricots verts."

By evening, when the convoy halted at Charmes, it was an open secret that the trail would be long. Malleson's commands were sterner than usual, his vigilance sharper. No driver lagged behind to refresh himself in a village buvette; when they stopped for the night no mess-call sounded until each car had been put in order for the morning start---the tanks filled, the brakes and tires inspected.

"Amiens is my guess," vouchsafed Swazey, as he knocked the ashes from his good-night pipe.

The next night the convoy reached Troyes. The historic old city lay quiet and gray in the moonlight, its buttressed walls and worn cornices seeming to express a life which might dwindle out ages hence from natural exhaustion, but which could not be snuffed out incontinently by the blast of war. Yet even here chipped spots on the stones and jagged holes in iron shutters of shop windows told of Boche air raids.

Before the start at dawn Malleson put a stop to the guessing.

"We're headed for Picquigny, just west of Amiens. Tonight we camp at Aumale. That's about all I know. The Wolves are enroute by truck and train. We'll be behind the British lines."

The day was queerly streaked with alternate sunshine and cloud. At times blue-black masses piled up in the sky, and the air became sultry, but no rain fell. For miles at a stretch the cars traversed country unscarred and blooming, lapped in peace. Of a sudden, with the crossing of a town boundary or the juncture of roads, the unnatural hubbub and fanfare of war would crash upon the ears: the thunderous trundling of trucks and gun caissons, the clatter of horseshoes over cobblestones; shouts; steady, ceaseless tramp of marching columns. Such a place was Beauvais---hot, crowded, anxious, seeing once more the prophetic shadow of the Hun upon its streets.

The convoy crawled through the traffic, under the lee of towering camions, piloted by unblinking, tiny Japanese, and containing hollow-eyed infantrymen, ghastly with fatigue. North of Beauvais the radiating roads, choked with infantry and convoys, stretched blue and dun-colored to the horizon.

The strain of driving told on the men, but Malleson maintained the pace. At nightfall the Section rolled into Aumale; by sunrise the cars were drawn up, backs to the curb, on the main street of Picquigny. The weather remained beautiful; a whiff of the sea cooled the air.

The town swarmed with British troops. Several brigades of Australians were in barracks a few miles distant. The Anzacs, big, lean fellows, devil-may-care fighters, swaggered about the streets and speedily took up with the "Yy-anks." Thirst was quenched by Gargantuan draughts; blood-curdling toasts were drunk to the discomfiture of ''Fritz.''

Swazey was in high spirits, and spirits of all kinds, but mostly low, were in Swazey. Completing a round of the cafés he fell in with a group of Australians surrounding a nucleus of gamesters whose exact operations could not be viewed because of the massed shoulders about them. A fair conjecture would be that of "crown and anchor." For some occult reason Swazey felt a distaste for one of the players, whose visage was directly opposite his own, but whose body was concealed. Being in an expansive mood, Swazey saw fit to announce that for two cents he would walk on the stranger's face. In fairness to Swazey it should be stated that at the time of the proclamation he confidently believed the stranger to be half a head shorter than himself. But it happened that the fellow was sitting down. When he rose, Swazey instantly conceded that his remark had been grossly inappropriate, but the Australian thrashed him just the same, and they became great friends.

The second night Dave and Larry Murdock stood guard duty from ten to twelve. Their business was to walk up and down the long row of ambulances, to discourage prowlers.

Next to Dave, Larry was the youngest member of the Section. He spent most of his leisure time pouring over a textbook of Algebra, working out its endless equations with a single-minded enjoyment which afforded plausibility to Swazey's contention that Murdock must have been allowed to fall on his head when young.

"I like to figure at it," Larry would explain, "because it's a puzzle that you know can be worked out---and that's more than you can say for this war."

Dave's eyes were tired from watching the white roads and his wrists ached from holding the wheel. But he was happy. He was beginning to understand why the men never got quite the deep contentment from a safe repos that they got from action. He had yet to learn that as the action grew perilous the satisfaction often changed imperceptibly into something dynamic, which suddenly emerged unblushing as downright consecration, capable of God knows what shining, crack-brained bits of heroism.

The boys paced slowly up and down, passing each other at the middle of the row. It was nearly midnight when Dave heard some one murmur:

"Monsieur."

A sweet voice, and young. Two small figures stood in the shadow of a tree which grew between the sidewalk and the curb. At first he mistook them for children.

The speaker was a young girt, with a face at once pinched and gay; the other, an old woman who said nothing, but smiled and bobbed humbly.

Dave knew little French. After trying in vain to interpret the girl's rapid speech he called Larry to his aid. The old woman bobbed and smiled while her daughter repeated the screed. Dave wished he could understand, so as not to appear such a dolt; the girl's eyes were big and lovely.

"She wants us to sell her a little sugar," reported Larry. "Says they've not had any for months. I think she's drawing the long bow a bit, but maybe not."

"We can't get in the mess-box," muttered Dave, "so I don't see how---Wait! Tell them to wait a minute. I've got something!"

He ran to his car, opened the back, and began rummaging for chocolate which he had brought from the Headquarters' Commissary in Paris. Suddenly he heard Larry shout, and simultaneously the air quivered with the wild, crescendo scream of a siren. The sound, beginning low, rose to a shriek and coasted down to silence; rose again, sank again, careening in its intolerable undulations over the town. And now the boy could hear the rhythmic, terrifying pulsations of the Boche planes, and the spatting of anti-aircraft batteries on the hill.

With his heart seeming to crawl in his throat, Dave raced back. To his amazement the girl was smiling coolly, and resisting Murdock's frantic urgings to seek shelter in one of the nearby cellars. The old woman, trembling and ejaculating, tugged at her daughter's arm.

"The girl's crazy, Dave!" cried Larry. "She says she and her mother have charmed lives. For God's sake give her that chocolate and let's get flat somewhere before things begin dropping!"

The pulsating drone sounded directly overhead. The siren had ceased.

Dave thrust the chocolate into the girl's hand and tried to start her toward the "cave."

"Non! Nous allons chez nous---moi et ma mère," she declared, "mais---prenez, monsieur---prenez !"

She stretched out a thin hand; the fingers held a crumpled five-franc note. Her movements were maddeningly deliberate, but a profound pity mingled with Dave's anxiety.

Abruptly through the barking of the guns and the beat of the motors came a hiss, vicious and penetrating, terminating in a crash that rocked the buildings and seemed to leave them gasping.

"That's my signal for the abri!" exclaimed Larry. "I'm done---that wasn't more than a block away!" He crouched and ran for the cellar.

The plane buzzed like a mammoth wasp. The sound stopped momentarily, again came the sibilant swish of the bomb, and again the buildings rocked.

"Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!" sobbed the old woman.

Dave seized the note, thrust it into the bosom of the girl's dress, and pushed her roughly toward the shelter. She yielded at first, then turned her slim body, sinewy and quick as a cat's, and kissed him squarely on the mouth. Her arms hugged him tight, fell away, and with a shrill laugh she started down the moonlit street, her old mother toddling a few yards behind.

Dave stood stupidly watching. His lips tingled from the violence of the kiss. For the moment his fear was forgotten in sheer surprise.

The two were half a block away when the next bomb fell. Dave saw the dumpy little figure of the old woman take a queer flounce, roll a yard or so, and lie still. The girl seemed to vanish.

The plane passed overhead and droned away into the distance; the guns ceased their useless spatting; the moonlight lay serenely over the silent streets. Dave and Larry, with several others of the Section, picked up the ill-clad old body and laid it on a litter. The left shoulder and half the breast were torn away.

They found the daughter huddled in the shadow of a stone hitching-block, white and unconscious, but breathing. Blood trickled over the hand which still clutched Dave's gift . . . . And the girl who bore a charmed life died the next morning in delirium, while the hospital orderly, a sensible fellow, was eating her chocolate.

WAR has its moments of equipoise, moments when thrust and parry appear to have ceased, and the semblance of inaction prevails. But it is only a false respite, created because the deadlock is perfect. It is in reality the very acme of violence, as instantly becomes manifest when either side wavers, be it ever so slightly.

The tension gets into minds, into voices, into glances. So it happened at Picquigny. In the midst of their leisure the Wolves were restless. A grizzled veteran, fresh from a wine-shop, would pause with sleeve to mouth, and gaze thoughtfully eastward, where the Boche shells were falling in Amiens; a boastful youngster, ogling the passing ma'm selles, would suddenly forget his jauntiness and shudder to himself in the sunshine. A sinister uneasiness poisoned the beauty of those spring days. Two names, now linked in revolting association, lurked in every one's thoughts---the Germans and Paris, the Germans and Paris. Not often spoken, the hideous refrain haunted the poilus. To the Frenchman Paris is more than a shrine, because more intimate; sweeter than dreams, for she is so often a dream's consummation. She is his deathless white city of love and laughter and life The soldiers murmured her name fondly, lingeringly---"Par-ee"---and their teeth snapped and ground in the pang of the knowledge of what threatened her.

The officers, like the subtle psychologists they were, took steps to obviate any possible drop in morale. Leisure was ample, but not absolute; regular leaves of absence had of course been rescinded, but twenty-four hour permits to Abbeville were allowed; the tobacco issue was generous, rations unusually satisfactory. These were material comforts to be thankful for, but also, to the experienced troops, portents of trouble. The inspiring regimental reviews at sunset, with the triumphant battle-music of the "169th," meant more than mere display; they meant the spiritual energizing of the men against a desperate day to come.

Malleson had little opportunity for conversation with Dave. But he observed that the boy had taken hold with assurance, and he gradually lost the sense of unwelcome responsibility. Yet the Lieutenant was in a state of mind which seemed to himself unaccountable. He existed only in the zest of approaching trouble. The day was important, the morrow vastly more so, the past negligible. His home, his parents, the girl he loved---or had loved---were all far withdrawn. He had his own solitary identity to establish, by some grandiose test; his own soul to acquit satisfactorily in its own eyes---and perhaps other balderdash to attend to.

One night after an air raid he made the round of the several houses where the men were billeted. He found Dave reading the Psalms to Swazey and Larry Murdock, who looked sheepish.

"Don't let me interrupt," said Malleson, and was secretly astonished to have Dave take him at his word. The boy read on, unselfconsciously and with a lyrical earnestness that held attention. As he listened and smoked, John felt ironical amusement at what resembled a snub from his little brother.

"But this rebuke is pointed with mighty words," he mused, sardonically. "I ought to be impressed. I believe I do detect the beat of invisible wings!"

. . . Dave reading his Bible, Malleson stamping about and smoking his cigar, the Wolves drinking, and humbly praying for the safety of Paris, the officers of the Divisional staff racing here and there in armored cars, or scrutinizing maps: varied forms of a classic gesture---the girding on of armor. And to each, in spite of their common purpose, to each his own darling method!

Then the Germans struck again, this time against the British at Berry-au-Bac and against the French along the Chemin des Dames.

An older, nerve-taut Malleson called his men together late the night of May 31. His face was haggard, his voice constrained, as he read to the silent group the General's brief message to the Division. Though it was intended chiefly for the Wolves, the Americans knew its significance. Fire and ice were in the simple words; valor and tears and anguished prevision.

"DIVISION OF THE WOLVES:

"Paris is in peril. Cost what it may to check him, the enemy must not pass. As you fought long ago at Verdun, as you have fought many times since, so must you fight again, though it be for the last time. Soldiers of France---I salute you!"

Only a word of explanation was needed. The Wolves were to be sacrificed to save Paris---thrown alone across the area of greatest penetration to hold the Boche until reinforcements could be brought up.

At four in the morning the Section got under way, moving steadily and fast, south. Dawn broke misty and fragrant, and deepened into a day of rare loveliness. All else was ugly, for this was the hour of defeat.

Trucks choked the roads---trucks loaded with men coming back from battle. Their faces were like pale stone masks, ghastly through the coating of dust. Over their cheeks ran smudgy lines, made by the drops of sweat and tears. Their eyes were unseeing, frightful, wide with a feral, indefinable horror---the look that can live in human eyes only through experience of the obscene, ultimate evil of war. These men had returned from an unimaginable hell, where nothing was normal; where wounds and the warmth of spouting blood were friendly; where pain came to be clutched as a boon, an assurance of sanity---a place where man's indomitable will sobbed itself out in bafflement as his puny flesh cringed and died. So they came back---hopeless wraiths, with futile, staring eyes; truckful after truckful, the retreat of an army . . . And then came the guns, a headlong riot of great caissons, their mute brown barrels still pointing defiantly toward the foe.

A strain of piercing sorrow through the blatant pæan of war, sounded the sobs and prayers of the refugees, begging protection against the Boche. Crowded from the way, old men and women, young girls and little, weeping children, pushing carts and lugging bundles, struggled along the ditches of the roadside or fell and lay still, overcome by heat and dust and exhaustion. None had food, none knew where to find a resting place. They only knew that the Germans were close behind---coming, coming!

The convoy halted at a narrow bridge to wait for the road to clear. Dave watched a little old lady who was trundling along a small wheelbarrow in which slept a chubby wee fellow of six. The quaint black bonnet the old lady wore had slipped askew and thin wisps of white hair hung about her wrinkled, waxy forehead. The boy was heavy, but evidently too exhausted to walk. Every few yards the woman sank to her knees, her breath breaking in hard sobs. A soldier, hurrying by, spoke to her in the bitter jest of that bitter day:

"On to Paris eh, Gran'mère! A German Paris."

The old lady sprang to her feet like a girl, her eyes snapping angrily.

"Never! Never! They will never see our Paris!"

Roar and rumble, clatter and shout, the retreat went on. A seemingly interminable line of trucks rolled over the shaking bridge, while the ambulances waited by the roadside, their engines thrumming. Here and there a driver took advantage of the pause to gnaw at bread or chocolate, or to gulp Pinard. Malleson passed the word down the column to replenish radiators from the stream. The Lieutenant himself remained at the head of the convoy, watching for a break in the traffic which would permit his cars to cross the bridge.

As Dave scrambled up from the stream with his bucket of water Swazey shouted to him:

"Hurry up! Road's openin'. Get ready."

Half a dozen more camions swept by and roared into the distance. The road lay clear.

They waited. Two minutes---three minutes passed. The drivers fidgeted.

"What the hell's the matter, Loot?" bellowed Swazey, though John was out of ear-shot.

Still they waited.

Then, from far in the rear, they heard cheering, which began faintly but grew louder and more frantic instant by instant. Along the hurrying, panic-filled line of retreat drifted a dust-cloud, nearer and nearer, until suddenly into view shot truck after truck, but---going the other way! To meet the Boche!

The camions were filled with soldiers in horizon blue, soldiers with crimson, maddened faces, soldiers whose eyes gleamed like the eyes of demons, and whose teeth glittered white as they shouted. As the first load swept by the men of the Section burst into a throat-splitting yell. Written with chalk on the back and side of each camion were the words:

"Boche---you shall not pass! We are the Wolves of Lorraine!"

No one knew where the Wolves would take the line. During the day all was in utmost confusion. The Section halted, moved on, doubled back on its tracks, halted again, skirting the edge of battle and waiting for definite orders. In the evening Malleson drew the convoy to the roadside out of traffic, left it in command of Sergeant Douglas, and set out to find the Médecin Divisionnaire, who was presumably with the Divisional staff a few kilometers to the rear.

At a prominent crossroads near a village he came upon a group of American soldiers, who were surging about one of the small board shacks erected to store shells. In the dusk Malleson could make out a Y.M.C.A. sign nailed to the roof. A Ford delivery truck was drawn up alongside.

Elbowing his way through the press he faced the angry men.

"What's going on here?"

A big private, prodigiously red-faced, managed a belated salute, and burst out:

"That fat slob in the Christer's suit! Him and his dame there've been sellin' chocolate and Camels all day to our buddies for double price, and now when we've walked five miles to get some the son of a bitch says it's too late---closin' up shop. Look at the stuff he's still got in those boxes back---"

"Stop that!" commanded John sharply. He turned to the counter. The Y.M.C.A. man was handing cartons of cigarettes to a girl in a tight-fitting, many-buttoned uniform, which bore no recognizable insignia.

"I advise you to stop your packing and listen to these men," said Malleson. "It's useless to be---" He stopped in annoyed surprise. He was looking into the heavy, unpleasant face of Milt Steffins.

"John Malleson !" cried Steffins. "Well, can you beat this!"

Neither offered to shake hands. From the day he had first talked with Steffins, at Indianapolis on his way to college, Malleson had disliked the fellow. Something distasteful seemed to emanate from his moist, fish-belly skin and his little shallow eyes.

Steffins launched into a garrulous account of how he had come out with an itinerant "canteen" from Compiègne; how he had had constant trouble trying to distribute his supplies fairly---"doughboys wanting everything for nothing"---how he and his "assistant," Mlle. Viard, were now late, and would have to search for sleeping quarters.

All the while the girl continued packing cigarettes and chocolate into a large case fitted with double padlocks. The doughboys grew desperate.

"Lieutenant, do we or don't we get our stuff ?" demanded the red-faced one. His expression was comically belligerent and at the same time worried, like that of a small boy making a losing fight for a doughnut.

"I think you do, if you'll stand by, in order," replied Malleson. "Is there a non-com with you? Send him up."

With a threat underneath his peaceful request John prevailed upon Steffins to supply the petitioners with enough to pacify them.

"Thanks, sir," said their non-com, a corporal, receiving the packages from Malleson.

"And this for you and your folks back home," added the red-faced warrior, thumbing his nose elaborately at Steffins. The doughboys trooped off down the road.

It was now almost dark, but Steffins insisted upon talking, referring sentimentally to the "good old days at I.U." He made no move to help the girl, who glanced up occasionally from her task. Her head was dainty, but even in the dim light her sapless white face with its vivid, reckless lips gave John the impression that, other things being equal, she would hardly be singled out of a crowd as an angel of spiritual helpfulness. But, as Steffins hinted, other things were not equal---and besides, Mlle. Viard was not officially connected with the Y.M., but was merely-was merely---"Aw hell, Malleson!" he ejaculated, "c'est la guerre, you know . . . . You say your outfit's waiting for orders? Think I'll follow you when you finally locate. Maybe the boys'll be glad to get some of my smokes, eh? What say?" He grinned with unctuous impudence.

Malleson shrugged his shoulders and turned away in disgust.

"This is a free country. But if you want an honest answer I'd say we could worry along without your fly-by-night outfit."

He left Steffins staring balefully after him.

Two hours later John rejoined his men. His word was brief.

"Sleep sound to-night, if you can. The Wolves are in the forest of Villers-Cotterets. They have orders not to yield a yard of ground. Our work begins at daylight."

LARKS were singing in the meadows near Villers-Cotterets. Imperfectly concealed at the edge of an apple-orchard a big gun was firing, not with the august deliberation proper to its caliber, but hurriedly, angrily. Between its outraged roars the melody from the fields trilled on, a serene and eternal music, remote from the petulant raging of man.

The drivers sat silent at the wheels, waiting. Imperceptibly, under that innocent benediction, the brittle calm of screwed-up courage sank to a hard repose. The young faces grew mature and ready.

A motorcycle, ridden by a dust-covered messenger in black, shot up the road from Villers-Cotterets.

Malleson read the printed slip, hesitated, then nodded slowly to the rider, who saluted, wheeled about and dashed away in the direction from which he had come.

Again the Lieutenant read the order.

"Twelve cars to the front, immediately." Twelve lives staked to save perhaps sixty. At what risk? Impossible to say.

"They're coming, they're coming---the Boche!" chanted a lame old peasant as he hobbled by. His words were a singsong reiteration. It would have been as easy for a dumb man to talk as for the crippled refugee to vary his phrase; his vocal cords had been tuned by panic to a single speech.

"Twelve cars to the front." An unknown front.

Malleson glanced down the long line of the convoy. To prepare for just such an emergency he had had the personal baggage of the drivers concentrated in a few of the ambulances, leaving the others free for service.

Swazey, Nolan, Larry Murdock, Dave . . . . Yes, he remembered, Dave's car was ready. Malleson's voice was carefully casual as he walked rapidly down the line, designating the men who were to answer the call.

But Dave was not chosen. As John approached his brother's car something like a powerful band tightened about his throat until he could not speak. Dave's eager face looked into his . . . . He passed on. The Dave he had seen was not a soldier, but a trembling urchin in a skimped little shirt, who stared anxiously at a lady and a bigger boy as they placed cold cloths on his forehead to stop a "nose-bleed."

Private Swazey believed himself chronically afflicted with the lion's share of night driving. His most urgent calls came after dark, or if they reached him sooner his car broke down, or his wounded were troublesome, or, all predictable obstacles failing, Nature herself turned obstructionist and brought on an outrageously premature twilight. Not that he was complaining. He freely absolved his Lieutenant from any suspicion of malevolent timing of wounds or pernicious meddling with sunsets.

"It's just my damned luck," he reflected. "I just happen to be there and the Loot can't help seem' me." Which was a fine and deserved compliment to himself; Swazey always did happen to be there.

To-night he was having trouble. The road to the big hospital at Betz was of rough cobbles, gray, and hard to see; moreover it led through a woods most of the way, and still worse, it was choked with traffic. But worst of all, Swazey was sleepy. Like all the other drivers he had been going steadily to and fro since the first call to the front three days before. But he prided himself on his ability to keep to the road even when unconscious. To wake with a start just in time to avoid ditches or collisions annoyed him exceedingly.

"What's the matter with the old eyes!" he growled to himself. "This here is a regular boulee-vard."

He delivered his wounded, and to escape traffic on the return trip detoured by a narrow road which rejoined the main highway a few kilometers from Villers-Cotterets. As he drew near the junction Swazey began to curse softly, but with growing earnestness. Of course it was to be expected! As if trucks and ambulances weren't enough, a convoy of big guns was passing. The peculiar clank and trundle of the caissons was an unmistakable sign.

Swazey drew his car close, his eyes straining and his ears cocked for the slightest gap in the procession. At the first, uncertain thinning of the black column he threw the ambulance forward, swung it sharply to the right, and took his place in the line. It was like thrusting an egg-shell between rolling cannon-balls.

"Not too bad, old top," he muttered; "now for the shuttle business."

Something prodded the back of the car, and Swazey moved forward cautiously until his front wheels touched the caisson just ahead. Instantly he slowed down and crept along until he again felt that gentle pressure at the back, then edged up to contact with the preceding carriage. The "shuttle business." It was continued until he had formed an accurate judgment of the speed at which the convoy moved. Once sure of that, he was able to avoid most of the bumps.

It was pitch black in the woods, and the road narrow. He dared not risk turning out to pass the procession on the left; at frequent intervals trucks or ambulances, towering ebony monsters, loomed up and snarled past, grazing his hubs. To meet one head on would be annihilation.

Sleep is a blessed thing-usually; and how Private Swazey could have slept that night!

About a kilometer from the clearing a road from the right merged into the highway at an easy angle. It was an innocuous spot by daylight, and even by night Swazey had passed the joining many times without mishap. But never before had he driven so mechanically, with his ears so unfaithful, with his eyes so heavy and dull.

It is one of the unworthy ironies of war---as perhaps of life---that honorable weariness from much serving brings no immunity, but rather destruction. And there were those who thought it particularly a pity that the hackneyed maxim must prove itself again through poor, happy Private Swazey.

Even so, he did not go down sleeping. But his shout of warning was lost in thunder and pain. An intolerable light flashed about him, but a light by which nothing was visible; the incandescence of shock within his brain. An endless falling through murmurous space---then, without consciousness of time, Swazey lay by the roadside. His left leg and all his left side seemed sunk fathoms deep in velvet, warm and delicious. After a while he attempted to turn over, to give his other side the comfort of that miraculous bed. To his amazement the left leg would not move. He tried again ---again. A flaming agony darted up from his ankle and knotted in his loins. He fainted with his own scream piercing his ears. When he recovered, the pain had gone, and in deep content he lay quietly in the darkness, listening to numberless wheels trundling by.

Swazey's first utterance on the affair was delivered to Dave and Sergeant Douglas two days later in the operating room---they were all operating rooms---of the hospital. His voice was thin but his words were again in character, though they had seeped through many hours of opiated sleep.

"The damn Frog never even saw my little bus between the guns . . . Where is my bus?"

The Sergeant made an expressive gesture.

"Gone fluey."

Swazey ruminated a moment, then seemed to dismiss the matter. He rolled his eyes round toward Dave.

"'Lo, kid. Say, I alw'ys was a neat soldier. Git me a mirror and my razor. These here bristles're raisin' me off the pillow.''

Douglas glanced warningly at Dave. Swazey had better not look in a mirror.

"Not yet, Bill. You've got a little party on, in a couple of hours. After that, all right."

"Party?" He tried to rise to his elbow. "Hey, what the hell! How come this strap over my chest?"

"You've got to lie still, Swazey," replied the Sergeant seriously. "You're hurt, and this afternoon the doctor is going to operate. Then you'll be all right."

The eyes of the wounded man flickered an instant, and became steady.

"Down---there? My leg?"

The Sergeant nodded.

Swazey rolled his eyes again to Dave, and back to the Sergeant's face. Suddenly he smiled a wry, heroic smile.

"Spit 'er out, Surge. The old leg's comin' off."

Again the Sergeant nodded, slowly. Dave laid a hand on Swazey's shoulder.

Bill seemed lost in thought. After a long silence, he abruptly demanded:

"Say, have they been feedin' me while I slept? My insides feel stuffed full, up to the neck."

Sergeant Douglas lied instantly:

"Sure. Don't think they'd let a blessé starve, do you, Bill? You sure can eat, even when asleep!" He turned briskly away. "Well, we've got to be going, but we'll be back this afternoon. Cheerio!"

"Wolves all right?" queried Swazey.

"Holding like hell. Lots of blessés, though. You're lucky to be out of it, Bill . . . . Come on, Dave!"

"Wait! Say, kid"---his voice sounded shy as he looked up at Dave---"kid, you take care of my stuff---my briquet, and money and pictures, and that Boche automatic that's in my bag. I don't want 'em to be swiped while I'm here. Good souvenirs to take back to the States."

"I've got them all safe, Bill," answered Dave huskily. "See you this afternoon."

But only Lieutenant Malleson stood by the white table, as the nurse fingered the ether-mask impatiently and waited for the surgeon. At noon the Germans had attacked near Croix de Vouty. Sergeant Douglas and Dave were engaged, as the vernacular had it, in "gathering meat." The little green ambulances were rolling, rolling.

"Loot," said Swazey quietly, "remember the guy I held while the saw-bones cut his foot off?"

"Nothing like that here, Bill. Don't worry! There's plenty of ether."

"I'm not worryin' . . . . Only . . . Only one thing riles me. Losin' a leg by a truck---and a Frog truck at that! I'll never have the nerve to look a real blessé in the face!"

This point need not have disturbed Private Swazey. As the nurse lowered the mask he twitched a bit; his face quivered and loosened. The surgeon paused. Swazey's eyes stretched wildly.

"What the hell, Loot! What . . ."

His amazed cry gurgled to silence, as he died in a frothy red flood that poured from his mouth.

The nurse clicked the instruments into a bundle; the doctor was already on his way to the next case, muttering:

"Internal---suspected it."

That night Sergeant Douglas, for almost the first time, lost his military demeanor. He was not crying, but he was unmistakably gulping as he turned away from the forlorn little pile of belongings which Dave was sorting on a blanket. Swazey's cherished and unspeakable pictures had slipped from their envelope. There were only two---one of a big-faced, awkward man, the other of a puzzled, humble little woman holding a baby that looked like Swazey.

Mitt Steffins grunted irritably and rolled about, vainly trying to find a spot on the sheet which was not moist and sticky from perspiration. These cursed French beds! They smothered you in summer and froze you in winter. The stagnant darkness of the room lay like a musty blanket over his fat, itching body, naked to the waist.

Was it daylight yet? He felt that he had tossed there for hours without a wink of sleep. His head ached, his tongue was like flannel, and in his ears was the incessant sound of wheels. Not imaginary wheels; they were real enough---the wheels of ambulances passing outside the swathed window, to and fro like shuttles, hour after hour and night after night. Curiously enough, the beat of the motors, though louder, did not disturb him. Their racket was mechanistic and modern and unsymbolical, but in those ceaseless inexorable turnings dwelt man's immemorial suffering, endless and perfect as the circle itself. Probably no such fanciful notion suggested itself to Steffins in so many words; his feeling was merely sour annoyance because all this must pass directly before his window.

Perhaps, after all, he'd better sleep in the basement room, as he had the first few nights at Villers-Cotterets. It was even stuffier, but it was not so noisy. Safer, too. But there was Mlle. Viard. . . . Mademoiselle! Pah! There was that cowardly slut who'd rather suffocate than stick her head above floors after dark, when the planes were likely to come, or the German guns to shell the town to prevent troop movements. What had he ever seen in her, with her white cheeks and her insistence, and her unbelievable dirtinesses . . . . He wished to God he'd never. . .

Steffins suddenly started from his half-doze and sat upright in bed. Cautiously he drew the blind a bit and peered through the crack. An ambulance had stopped just outside his window. In the gray light Steffins perceived John Malleson hurrying with a cup of water from the city fountain which flowed sluggishly over its shattered basin fifty yards down the street.

Malleson opened the small window in the side of the ambulance. "Raise your head a bit, Larry," he ordered; "there-how's that," He held the cup to a white face.

"Thanks, Lieutenant," murmured a weak voice, in reply.

When the wounded boy had finished drinking and let his head sink back to the stretcher Malleson spoke cheerily.

"Don't fret too much, old man. You'll be taken directly to the big American hospital at Neuilly, where you'll have every care. At the first chance some of us will get in to see you. So---cheerio!"

He snapped the window shut and gave a curt order to the driver. The ambulance moved on, leaving the Lieutenant standing by the curb. His shoulders sagged wearily. The listening Steffins heard him mutter bitterly:

"God, for some stretcher-bearers! Can't spare any more drivers like Larry." He walked away slowly toward the barracks.

Steffins was still propped up on his elbow when Mlle. Viard, clad only in a soiled chemise and stockings, entered and approached the bed. It is painful to relate that her fellow worker in Christian charity had drawn back a clenched fist when he noticed that she was holding his morning bowl of steaming chocolate.

A dense vapor, white and wet as milk, lay like a shroud over the plain beyond the woods of Villers-Cotterets. The few shattered trees resembled dim arabesques on a ghostly tapestry. Overhead the mist blended by livid nuances into a sky like soiled gauze.

A single heavy report, far in the rear, rolled its thunder out across the plain, splitting the mist into aisles and tunnels of sound. Instantly, from the other direction, machineguns set up their chatter. There were short hissings through the gloom, and the leaves rustled and clicked as if many decks of cards were being violently shuffled.

A little group of Wolves, crawling on their stomachs, left the fringe of the forest and worked their way gradually toward a low ridge a hundred yards away. Their progress was snail-like over the contused and malodorous ground. Their fingers gripped like claws, their faces skimmed the wet turf. When they had reached a point thirty yards from the woods the big gun spoke again. This time other batteries took up the signal; the rumble spread slowly to half the are of the horizon; the ground-floor quivered and vibrated like a tympanum under the shock of the explosions.

A hint of rose-pink showed in the east, gradually warming to an opaline glow. The mist began to twist in fantastic spirals against the deepening color.

Still crawling, the Wolves moved faster. They descended into a slight hollow. With an exclamation one soldier rose, but crouched instantly at the fierce command of the leader, and crept on, gagging.

"C'est le parfum ineffable des Boches, mon vieux," muttered another jocularly. "Exquis---hein!"

The hollow reeked with a stench that clung like viscous liquid to their faces; their fingers sank into undulant spongy masses that bubbled under the weight; their rifles trailed through the paste of rotting flesh.

The mist was lifting, and the rumble of the guns grew tremendous. As the Wolves neared the ridge a messenger met them, spoke a word to the Lieutenant and scuttled back. Crouching, they waited. Other groups were now visible under the thinning vapor, all converging toward the height. This ridge was held by Frenchmen. The crawling groups were moving to their support, but they could not have exercised more caution had they been nearing the trenches of the enemy.

The roar of the cannons rose in a mighty crescendo and suddenly ceased, as the rim of the sun appeared. Instantly the parapet sprang to life; blue clad figures clambered over its edge; their bayonets glistened momentarily, and with a shout they were gone, charging across No Man's Land toward the edge of another woods which formed part of the general forest.

Immediately the Wolves who were waiting leaped to the empty trench. A sharp command, the thumping of feet on duckboards, and the support troops were in their places, alert and tense, watching their comrades who were nearing the enemy woods. Few fell; here and there a blue soldier flipped into a somersault as a machine-gun bullet took him, but the others dashed on and vanished into the forest.

After ten minutes the Lieutenant in the reserve trench pushed hack his helmet and smiled. His boyish face was full of relief.

"C'est fait, mes braves," he declared. "Nous restons ici."

"Épatant !" ejaculated a sweating veteran. "Heureusement j'ai gardé mon Pinard." He tipped the canteen and gurgled happily.

The ten o'clock sun shone brightly over the courtyard of the big building whose basement served as barracks for the ambulance men. Three cars, one with half the body gone, were parked near the gate. A mechanic in greasy blue denim tinkered with the motor. Occasionally he ceased his hammering, squinted nervously at the sky, and resumed his work.

Across the court half a dozen drivers clustered about the Ark of the Covenant, eating from tin plates and drinking great draughts of black coffee: Their motions were slow and inept, like those of the blind; they dropped morsels of food, and behaved as if they were just learning to use forks. Their uniforms were crumpled and dust-stained; their hands grimy, their faces sparkless and stupid with fatigue.

The mechanic clamped the hood of the car and sauntered over to the tranced group. He had slept four hours the night before and was in fine feather.

"Hey, Fatty!"

Talbot woke with a start, just in time to save his mug of coffee which was slipping from his fingers. The mechanic grinned.

"You're a fine driver, Talbot! S'pose the Boche broke through? Here you'd be, like a sleeping beauty, waiting for him to cut your buttons off."

"Go 'way, Pete," responded Talbot drowsily, "I'm not a driver---I'm a clerk that has to drive."

"Yep," agreed Pete cheerily, "everybody's a driver these days. Say"---his tone became serious---"I wonder if you fellows feel as I do since Larry got hit. Can't explain it quite, but I feel relieved. Up till that time there was something unnatural about our luck. We were like the mouse that the cat plays with---not being hurt, but just teased along."

"Damn superstition," growled Nolan, but his face showed a trace of interest.

"True, just the same," persisted Pete, helping himself to coffee. "It's tough on Larry, but he's taken the charm off us. We may pull through without any more casualties. Of course there was poor Bill Swazey, but that wasn't the Boche."

Dave had been listening with curious intentness, in spite of his weariness. He had been conscious of that very uneasiness which Pete described. Mingled with it was an uncomfortable sense of guilt---guilt forced upon him by his brother. As he looked back over the past week he could not escape the suspicion that John was shielding him. Of all his "runs," only five had been to dangerous postes, the others evacuation trips from Villers-Cotterets to the big hospital at Betz. It might have been mere coincidence; Malleson was too busy to direct each call. The Lieutenant himself was driving with the others, haggard, dirty and tireless. Dave felt all his old worship burning anew. Just the same . . .

That evening he stopped John by the door of the barracks. In those tumultuous days military punctilio had gone by the board. But an obscure impulse, born in the earnestness of his heart, brought Dave's hand to a salute.

The Lieutenant heard him impassively, and for a moment remained silent, his eyes narrowed and brooding. For a flitting moment Dave felt again that by some fantastic transfiguration his brother had vanished and that in his place stood Malleson the elder, Malleson the incomprehensible.

"Tumble into your bunk, Dave," said John quietly, "I'm running this outfit."

And Dave tumbled in, as he had one Halloween years before when this same John had saved him from the torture.

Sergeant Douglas had taken the engineering course in college and had ranked near the head of his class. He had been reputed to know the textbooks almost word for word.

To-day, as he sat in the damp "cave" of the Croix de Vouty poste, he wished with all his heart that he had stuck to the School of Liberal Arts. For in that case he would have never studied that excellent book, The Strength of Materials. Like the two glum stretcher-bearers beside him, like Nolan over there, slouched on his bunk, he would have confidently assumed that materials had strength, and not pursued the matter further.

Not that the book threw much light on the present situation. He glanced at the roof. He knew that above that visible ceiling of timbers lay sheets of corrugated iron; on the iron turf was piled; that another layer of logs rested on the turf, and topping it all were sandbags and clumps of sod. It would be exceedingly difficult, the Sergeant decided, to calculate the strength of the shelter according to formulas. Yet---the Strength of Materials---the Strength of Materials . . . The phrase capered and prodded about in his brain maddeningly.

"Fritz is shelling pretty lively for this time of day," he remarked, glancing toward the low, square entrance through which he could see grasses waving in the sunlight. His ears were roaring so that he barely heard Nolan's surprised answer.

"Shelling? Sarge, you're nutty! No shelling here since early morning."

Sergeant Douglas smiled at the feeble joke. His head ached and he wished he could lie down and sleep, but a noncom ought to set an example of calm alertness, especially in the presence of these experienced Frenchmen.

The cave was fitted out with bunks arranged in "triple-decker" style, and composed of stretchers resting upon crosspieces nailed to the beams which supported the roof. The Sergeant, who was not far from the entrance, noticed a huge, sluggish beetle waddling down one of the beams. He wondered idly if the insect would turn in at one of the bunks or descend the whole way. Its progress was deliberate, as if motivated by some profound purpose. The Sergeant watched it carefully.

Then an amazing thing happened. The beetle suddenly lost foothold, fell to the ground, and as it struck exploded with a terrific concussion that rocked the Sergeant's head on his shoulders, and set his ears roaring with ten-fold violence. He gasped, and was about to shout to the others, when he noticed with amazement that they were apparently unaware of what had occurred. Nolan's long legs hung lazily over the bunk; the two Frenchmen sat impassive as before.

Sergeant Douglas began to chuckle. The muscles of his face seemed to catch the infection, and in a moment were twitching furiously. He raised a hand and was astounded to see it shaking as with palsy. In sudden panic he tried to speak, but his voice slid and flickered in silly twitterings.

He made no resistance as Nolan and one of the stretcherbearers led him to an ambulance. Nolan was badly frightened, but the Frenchman reassured him.

"Too long under the shells, mon vieux. Some people can't stand it. A few days' rest . . . some quiet sleep . . .

The young Lieutenant in the reserve trench had loosened his helmet and smiled too soon; his fagged followers might better have postponed the tipping of their bidons, though they would never have admitted that a drink could be premature. Past the still midday and on into the afternoon the ulcerous ground beyond the parapet lay vacant and noxious in the sunlight. The few blue figures which in the morning had clawed and kicked or lain motionless had been collected and sent to the hospital or to the grave.

The shadows were creeping from the Villers-Cotterets forest; the ineradicable sweetness of leaves and grasses at evening stole out with the breeze from the woods. When the sun had set, the spirit of havoc lay quiescent, conquered by man's yearning for peace. As always, the wish became father to the thought, and along that vermin-infested ditch hovered the lovely, fatal illusion. Experience counted for little. Under the necromancy of the twilight the souls of the poilus slipped from their dirty shells in pursuit of visions, the lover to his mistress, the father to his children, the poet to his cloud, the dawdler to his ease, the numskull to his blankness. This wholesale exodus left the trench practically deserted, which was unfortunate. For the Germans, with habitual obtuseness, failed to respect dreams. Or perhaps they were merely consummating a dream of their own.

Yet the young Lieutenant could hardly be blamed. He had no way of knowing that beyond the woodland into which his comrades had charged something had gone wrong.

The air shuddered and screeched, as with the abruptness of a thunderclap the first shell exploded on the parapet. Before its concussion died away another landed---then another and another---many more. It was magnificent gunnery; calculated, unremitting, deadly. In a moment the ditch was a shambles. Shouting hoarsely, the Lieutenant rallied the survivors, leaped to the open ground, and started toward the Germans. A heroic, pitiful gesture---nothing more. Five yards from the parapet his body burst into scarlet pulp and spray and rags of sky-blue cloth. A few of his men rushed on; a few, utterly mad, crushed their faces to the earth and waited, whimpering; more, screaming inhumanly, or with the calm of ghastly automatons, turned and walked back toward the trench. None progressed more than a few steps.

This was not wounding, not a clean piercing of limbs; this was devastation, an intemperate, unspeakable churning of tissue and bone into the primitive slime from which, presumably, they had come. Gouts of dripping flesh, shapeless segments of men, bounced through the metallic smoke in grotesque, macabre confusion.

Presently the creeping black barrage moved on from the amorphous parapet a few yards toward the fringe of the darkening woods; pounded, pounded, lest a single victim escape. Suddenly it ceased. As the echoes of its crashing died away, from the opposite forest which should have been French ground a wall appeared, undulated into a wave, advanced, and gaining speed, separated into discernible figures---the rather unamiable figures of the Prussian Guard, charging.

This, like the barrage, was pretty, in its way. Unlike the barrage, it was touched with the pathetic futility which accompanied the bravest efforts of the physical man in that war of steel and poison. The olive-hued wall, moving out from the fringe of the woods, remained awesome just so long as it remained cohesive and unsentient; when it dissolved into scurrying mannikins, each carrying his little ballast of thought and life, the affair took on tragic pity. That the mannikins wore inverted buckets on their heads, that their bayonets glinted in the crepuscular light, that their faces were square and blond and convulsed by an insane and spurious rage---in short, that the mannikins were Teutons in a berserker charge took nothing from the ironic fact that they were life-loving creatures scuttling to doom.

Not until the first rank of the Germans had crossed the trench did their doom appear. One must judge by the visible occurrence; doubtless during that calculated advance more than one indurate Prussian mind found time to wonder. The Wolves seldom granted easy right of way. But when the leaders at last saw the truth they could only gasp, lower their heavy helmets, and take their last steps blindly.

The edge of the French woods sprang to life, a life whose sole movement was the slow, deadly swinging of black steel tubes, to and fro, like metronomes on a horizontal plane. But the noise was the maniacal clatter of a thousand triphammers on metal plates.

Ah, la belle mitrailleuse! That delicate little darling---so light, so vituperative, so fatal! The Gallic heart rejoiced to its core as the roughened Gallic hands fingered the cartridge-strips caressingly.

The machine-guns had been placed in a solid line just within the shelter of the forest. Only the smoke of the German barrage had made their concealment possible. The Wolves, at home in their forest,. had moved like phantoms among the trees, while their comrades were dying in the blasted trench. Their work had now become almost monotonous; merely the deliberate swinging of the spatting black tubes. Occasionally a gunner grunted or shrieked, and his hands dropped limp. Another sprang to his place. The Wolves had certain simple orders to carry out; one happened to be an injunction that at this particular forest-border the well-worn phrase "shall not pass" was to be considered strictly in vogue.

The Germans did not pass, though they tried intermittently all through the night. Wave after wave they came on, wave after wave they melted away, leaving soft dark mounds for their comrades to leap or trample. Their counter-fire became more vicious; the bullets clicked and whined through the leaves, and many of the blue gunners fell. But this had been expected. Reserves were waiting. That thin blue line was all that mattered, not the personnel which composed it.

A few of the Germans gained the woods and staggered into captivity, shouting "Kamerad!", their eyes wild, their hands high above their heads. Others, braver or more bereft, having miraculously passed the machine-guns, fought to their death in the forest. There were gruesome, primeval killings in the blackness of the big trees; screams, blood-throttled prayers, grunts, animal noises, as the naked bayonets ripped and plunged.

All night long the ambulances were rolling, rolling, laden with French and Boche alike. The drivers brought their cars to the very edge of battle, leaped from the wheels and aided the litter-bearers. The handles of the stretchers grew sticky and foul; the canvas soggy with blood-clots and vomit. The mortuary abysses of the woods steamed with the tepid, sickening effluvia of slaughter.

Long before daybreak the supply of litters and litter-bearers failed.

"Brancardier! Brancardier! Dieu! Au secours!" sounded the agonized voices from all sides. Word went out to the ambulance men to bring back only French wounded. And still the desperate pleas for stretcher-bearers pierced the chatter of the guns.

The pale rose light of the June morning was sifting through the leaves when John Malleson and a companion, carrying folded litters, paused at the entrance to a path which skirted the machine-guns to the open ground.

"Look!" gasped the Lieutenant in horror.

A Frenchman was staggering toward them, laughing furiously, with a face like a writhing rubber mask. Tears streamed over his cheeks; his hands, intertwined beneath his gaping belly, lugged his protruding entrails as in a basket. The monstrous specter reeled on, unconscious, chattering and mouthing. Suddenly it slumped and sank, as Malleson shoved the stretcher beneath it.

A shell crashed somewhere down the path; a riven tree creaked and plunged, with a tumultuous roar and swishing of branches.

"Drag him back!" shouted Malleson's companion; "I'm off to get another." He started down the path toward the maledictions and cries for help.

"Bonne chance, Milt!" cried the Lieutenant. "You're there!"

'The hell with that!" shouted the puffing Steffins over his shoulder.

Motionless, Malleson watched him as he waddled toward the shelling, his fat legs interfering with each other at every step. . .

By the middle of June the lines had become stabilized. The Germans had been hurled back, and were resting to recover breath about eight kilometers from Villers-Cotterets, while the Wolves watched them warily from their defensive positions in the forest. The communiqués laconically mentioned the French "victory" ; the special writers on the Paris dailies did themselves a bit prouder, and the jaded, anxious loiterers on the terrasse of the Café de la Paix learned that Paris was saved again---this Paris which passed before them in paint and mascara, together with another Paris which had toiled in its little stone shops since before Villon tippled and sang of ladies gone with the long-gone snows.

Paris is saved. As an epigram points a moral, so such utterances, picked from the crest of advancing or receding action, carried a counterfeit weight of finality. Epigrams and slogans of victory dart on such brisk wings, morals and trench warfare move so soddenly, that one should be easily pardoned for loving the former a bit too well.

Even at the Front the tendency existed to think in episodes. The mind rebelled at the truer but drearier conception of war as a process of slow deterioration under inexorable pressure, in which all but the greatest individual actions were mere muscle twitches.

When the Section moved from Villers-Cotterets to the village of Boursonne, a few kilometers distant, the drivers behaved as if the war were over. There were wassails, and caperings, and exuberant letters home. The hard facts of continued poste duty, continued shelling of the roads, continued woundings, ceased to carry the poignancy of a crisis. The affair was settled; the Germans were not to pass.

Sharing the general complacency, John Malleson was aware of a certain obscure and private triumph which he would have found impossible to describe. Any terms he could hit upon to express it would, he felt, he blather and mawkishness. Suppose he should yield to an impulse and proclaim:

"Well, I have met the test and passed without help; my soul is my own."

A hearer would be justified, he reflected, in knocking him down, uniform and all, on the grounds that this war was a simple enterprise in cooperative violence, not a trying-field for piddling, personal souls. And the hearer might have been wrong, but he would have been in the majority. . . Malleson knew all this, yet his impulse remained.

He drew into a new intimacy with Dave, which kept alive his sense of watching over his brother. Habit had much to do with it; so had memory; so, perhaps, had a far deeper influence which, half in irony, half in tenderness, plays upon men and persuades them into a fatuous conviction of responsibility for their fellows.

Action in the sector took on a curious aspect of whim, sometimes playful, sometimes deadly, like the cavortings of a good-humored tiger. The French pounded a village unmercifully, and upon entering found only a German sign stuck upon the ruined church, satirically inquiring what they had been shooting at . . . . A Boche plane sported impudently about three French observation balloons, shot down two of the amazed saucisses, and lingered about the third until the crack-brained pilot of the plane fell, his body riddled . . . . A train of whippet tanks loomed at dawn out of the misty woods, like a procession of phlegmatic saurians, lumbered about for half an hour under spiteful gunfire, and returned indifferently to the forest. The Frenchmen at Corey made several unofficial, serpentine journeys into No Man's Land the night of the third of July, and in the morning the Boche, hugely disgruntled, cut loose with machine-guns to mow down a long row of flaunting little American flags set up between the trenches . . . . The fat French cooks, reverting to type, forgot caution as well as martial scruples, and scuttled about the deserted shops of Villers-Cotterets, salvaging whatever good wine remained in the cellars . . . . In short, it was a time of grotesque and prankish irresponsibility. An episode had closed; why not play before the next?

There was at least one region in the sector to which no spirit of levity had penetrated---a region, indeed, in which no spirit but the dark fantastic genius of the Congo could feel at home. In an obscure depth of the forest a battalion of Senegalese lay hidden. Though they wore French uniforms, these black men knew nothing of the ideals behind the horizon-blue. They knew but vaguely why they were there. The understanding that glimmered in their aboriginal souls was as dim as the light which seeped through the great trees.

The savages squatted about in groups like so many sable idols, their powerful shoulder muscles swelling their uniforms at each slight movement of the arms. In that lunar dusk their faces glistened with a dark, fluorescent sheen; their teeth flashed as the low, guttural jargon bubbled over their lips.

An experienced and villainous-looking French officer sauntered about, muttering to himself occasionally, and casting uneasy glances over the Senegalese. The little groups appeared to be gradually coalescing. Imperceptibly, as the afternoon wore on, the amalgamation took place; the jabbering increased in violence, and although apparently each savage talked independently of all the others, the throaty chant began to rise and fall with a wild rhythm.

The French officer scowled. What worried him most was the slight rotary motion of the wrists which the negroes were performing, much as if they were driving screws. But the huge ebony hands held, instead of screw-drivers, the murderous native bolo knives, which resembled elongated meat-cleavers . . . . And each man was talking to his knife.

Mess hour had passed unnoticed; the forest grew dark, and out of the darkness rose that ominous threnody, gradually losing its strain of lamentation, increasing in tempo, and taking on an insane and furious exultancy. The French officer listened, swore to himself magnificently, and shrugged his shoulders as one who accepts the inevitable.

It was Lieutenant Gervais who, several hours later, brought the news to Malleson.

"The Senegalese have broken loose---left their guns and gone out carving. I suppose they got tired waiting for Boche blood there in the forest."

Gervais was exasperated and at the same time amused. These irregular sorties of the black troops struck him as serio-comic. No order, no artillery preparation, no martial propriety--merely irruptions of black giants, crazed by fear or hate or the suspense of bewildered waiting.

The Senegalese did not charge to gain an "objective"---this ridge or that trench---but to satisfy an appetite as insistent as hunger or lust. They had been known to bring back fingers, hands, and even heads, which, to the olfactory delectation of the barracks, sometimes remained undiscovered for days. Under heavy shelling their ferocity melted away, leaving them aimless and whimpering as children. They had a habit of getting wounded gorgeously, losing great segments of shell-torn flesh and gallons of blood with a sort of grieved surprise. Their black hulks survived, apparently by their very passivity, horrible wounds which would have killed white men. They could not be counted upon to help themselves in the slightest degree . . . . It was no wonder that Lieutenant Gervais hated to bother with Senegalese blessés.

Malleson left the Frenchman grumbling and fingering his mustache, and crossed from his basement room to the hospital courtyard where the ambulances were parked. The moon was high, dropping its light so brightly that the numbers on the worn little cars were visible. No. 9892---Dave's car. On a sudden impulse Malleson decided to have the boy make the reconnoitering trip with him. The night was beautiful; the Senegalese affair would in all probability prove a mere diversion; Sergeant Douglas could handle the calls. He hadn't seen much of Dave lately---and after all there were other things than war! Life had still the old unregimented simplicities if one could forget the absurd formulas of "service." Two young men might still joy-ride in a Ford, though the Ford was an ambulance and they were in khaki

With Dave at the wheel they drove down the moonlit road toward Villers-Cotterets. The boy was no longer a novice; his touch was capable and assured. Slouched beside him, Malleson ruminated sentimentally upon the passage of years

"There sits the little brother-the kid---out of reach of the apron-strings! Lord! I'm an old man---old enough to die."

At the outskirts of the town Dave swung the ambulance sharply to the right where the road crossed the railroad tracks. From their flat-car carriages projected the graceful, hooded barrels of two long-range Navy guns.

Malleson chuckled appreciatively.

"We're getting bold, eh, Dave? A month ago the Frenchmen couldn't have pulled those beauties within two miles of here."

"I think it's drawing near the Allies' turn, don't you, John?"

"Perhaps," responded Malleson carelessly. "No telling. This war has fooled a lot of prophets."

"I've got one ambition," confessed Dave, after a pause, "that I'm a little ashamed of. Just the same I have it. I don't want to go home without a Croix de Guerre. The Croix would---well, it would mean more to me than to you or to most fellows."

Malleson understood. Yes, a decoration would mean much to Dave, who hadn't even a name; one thing, at least, all his own.

They entered the forest and rolled on at but slightly decreased speed, for the road lay broad and white. The air was sweet; the big trees seemed patiently waiting. Through the leaves they could discern, far ahead and a little to the right, an occasional Very light which hung in the sky, blanched and motionless, before fading into the gray.

"That's at Corey," muttered Malleson. "The Senegalese have Fritz guessing. Hello! Hear that? He's going to scare them back."

The distant growl of a shell stirred the quiet of the forest. Others followed at intervals, and over a wide area. It was plain that the Germans were firing with no definite mark, but merely to discourage troop movements in the region behind the isolated negroes.

Midway between Villers-Cotterets and Corey lay Maison Forestière, a large house at a prominent four-corners. Here a central poste, or regulatrice, had been established to control ambulances in the visits to the stations in the lines. Four cars were regularly on call at Maison Forestière. When a loaded ambulance passed on its way from the Front to the hospital at Boursonne one of the cars from the Maison took its place, while another drove out from Boursonne to keep the quota of four complete. In emergencies all four could hurry to the lines.

A single ambulance was waiting when John and Dave arrived. The driver informed them that the other cars had already gone back, by a short cut through the woods, loaded with Senegalese; there had been no call for half an hour.

"Davies, who went in last, said the affair was about over," added the driver. "He said the niggers ran wild for a little while but their officers rounded most of them up about the time Fritz started shelling. The mean part seems to be that the shells're playing hell with that stretch of road from Dampleux to the Croix de Vouty poste---especially in the woods. They've eased up some now. No need for you to go up, though."

It was true; there was no need. But Dave looked disappointed, and Malleson, still in his brainless, holiday mood, decided to go anyway.

"As you say, Dave, the war may be nearly over. I'll sing 'On the Banks of the Wabash'---God bless our home!---and you pray, and we'll run the gauntlet."

He took the wheel, sprang the clutch and shot the car down the road.

"Child's play, eh, kid!" he chuckled. "Smooth as the road to Kingdom Come. Voilà the woods!"

At reckless speed they plunged into the Corey forest. Dave laughed in sheer excitement.

"Don't laugh---pray, pray!" bantered the other. "I'll start my song:"

Not far down the way a shell crashed; a moment later they rode through its lingering acrid fumes. Guiding with easy. careless touch Malleson slewed the car to avoid a fresh shell-crater.

"Dad's favorite song, Dave-remember? Wouldn't he enjoy this! I don't mean the singing . . . . Yea there!" Again he swerved; one wheel dipped but climbed to the level instantly.

Straight ahead of them a Very light rose serenely, hung in the heavens like a gigantic candle, shedding a mystic, passionless glow. Slowly it faded; the darkness drifted back.

And then Malleson heard the whistle of the shell---a wandering shell like hundreds of others which in the last year had screamed at him spitefully and passed harmlessly by. The next instant he felt himself snatched into a vast and soundless void, without atmosphere but glaring with light; felt his body, his whole being, poised in miraculous balance over abysses of delirium, then seized as by a mighty suction and brought whizzing back infinite distances to the roar and beat of consciousness. His bowels churned with nausea; his nostrils burned; a stinging veil seemed to be scraping his eyes. Feeble and gasping, he leaned against Dave's shoulder. Slowly his senses rallied. He tried to raise his hand to his eyes; the left arm hung numb and wet, saturating his sleeve. He realized that the car was tilted downward and forward at a perilous angle; only the top-support kept him and Dave from slipping from the seat. As his vision cleared he was able to make out that the right front wheel had buckled, so that the ambulance rested on its axle. The motor was dead; a soft trickling told him that water or gasoline was leaking.

Perhaps it was by some merciful decree that Malleson was led through his mazed and stupid observation of these mechanical phenomena before it occurred to him to think of Dave. The boy's case was simple. There he sat, slumped a bit in the seat, silent, motionless. His khaki sleeve and thin hand looked very natural in the flicker of moonlight that penetrated the leaves. His body, from the chest up, was in darkness.

"All right, Dave?"

No reply. The repose of the boyish figure was profound and complete.

For just an instant Malleson turned his pocket flashlight on Dave's head. It was a spying upon one of Death's obscene secrets, instantly punished . . . . Choking, the Lieutenant turned and stumbled off through the forest.

His eyes were open, his hearing acute, his right hand deft in pushing aside the underbrush, yet, under the mesmeric influence of a fear so overwhelming that it stupefied reason, he moved as mechanically as a somnambulist. One tremendous desire possessed him-to get as far as possible from the ambulance. He was unable to visualize Dave; by some monstrous legerdemain his little brother had been perverted and brutalized before his eyes into an unspeakable thing which, though faceless, somehow seemed to gloat ---a blemished gargoyle with an imbecile leer about its bloody chops.

He plunged on and on through the forest.

"It's with me," he thought---"still with me!" And instantly a tiny chuckling voice added, "Forever---oh, yes, forever!"

The suggestion stung his mind to a crazy rebellion; caught the notion that if he didn't instantly refute that "forever" he was utterly lost. The thing to do was to stop and deny it---blot it out of hearing . . . . He shouted some furious word; the breath seemed to coagulate in his throat and sicken him. A twig lashed back across his face he staggered on a few steps, toppled and fell, face down. The cold fragrance of moss drenched his nostrils . . . . A sense of cunning triumph possessed him. Why---of course! This was the thing to do. Crouch. Lie low. No use killing oneself running . . . . Outwit . . . The moss seemed to thicken enormously and fold about him like a blanket.

A gnawing in his left arm awoke him. He had no idea of how long he had lain unconscious. The woods were still dark, but high overhead among the leaves a pallid light seeped in, gradually sinking farther down toward the big branches. Carefully he raised himself by his right arm to a sitting posture. One cheek was drawn and stiff, as with scabs: he had been lying so that the dripping sleeve had pressed against his face, and the blood had clotted.

All numbness had gone from the injured arm; the wound clawed fiercely, but the bleeding had almost ceased. From what examination he could manage there in the gloom he decided that the fragment of shell had torn the flesh badly and probably fractured the bone, but missed the nerve; his fingers, though swollen, were not "asleep."

The pain acted as a mordant tonic. In spite of his weakness from loss of blood, Malleson experienced something like relief at finding physical sensations again dominant in his consciousness. Anything better than that maniacal dread! It was possible now to pierce the confusion that had swathed him, and to think again of Dave as he had been. Possible, but almost intolerable. The visualization brought back with diabolic distinctness every lovable and pathetic trait---the shyness, the humbleness, the fathomless trust. Dave came back not as a soldier, but as a little, lonely boy.

A recollection, poisonous and skulking, crept through the surface of Malleson's thought.

"I brought Dave to his death---brought him needlessly."

The idea roused him to a sort of desperation. But now something mightier than terror, something far more profound, loomed behind the ugly forms of guilt and pain. As if a veil had been removed he saw the pitiful arrogance of human courage; saw himself puny and ludicrous, his soul dumb and abashed before the vulturism and demonism of death. And in his helplessness he imagined with what ironical amusement Death must have watched his furtive efforts to protect Dave during the last few weeks, just as Life must have smiled at his guardianship of the boy for many years before. As if any man could save another! Another? Not even himself.

Himself. Was he, John Malleson, to die quietly here in the forest, merely because a piece of iron had ripped his flesh and let the blood spill out? No such wound need be fatal; any doctor could stanch the flow. He himself could have stopped it if---if---if . . . But no doctor had been there---and he too had been absent; all the sentient, reasoning part of him gone truant and wandering, through the hinterlands of fear and confusion. Damn it! That was the exasperating part. At the moment when help was needed, no help at hand, not even his own. That was the way Death worked---treacherously.

Malleson felt a profound discouragement. He was puzzled too, and by an absurd question. Was he awake or dreaming? Was anything about this cursed situation real? In petulant impatience he thrust his feet against the earth and with a violent heave rolled over on his wounded arm., The pain was excruciating. He bore it a moment, then rolled back. The arm throbbed its whole length. Gritting his teeth, Malleson again thrust and heaved, bearing his weight upon the wound, in a fury of self -torture. Suddenly the fibers of his will snapped and parted. That fictitious wall which one builds between childhood and manhood collapsed, and the Lieutenant was again back in the land of hobgoblins, where bedside prayers and the mother's knee are the only means of escape. It was stark, nursery panic that seized him now. And it must have been Emma Malleson's reassuring voice that raised her son to his knees with the beginning of his babyhood prayer on his lips.

Ten feet from him a figure stirred. In that moment of grotesque illusion he may have taken it for his mother, moving in the soothing half-light of his bedroom.

If so, the pranks of delirium are beyond respectable justification. For as John emerged at last into complete sanity he found himself staring at the hideous, blunted countenance of a Senegalese negro. The light of full morning was now penetrating the foliage, and Malleson saw that what he had at first mistaken for an hallucination was real---perhaps too real. The black was quite mad. Bewilderment and fright under the heavy shells had been too much for him.

His enormous hands hung passively, palms to the front; his body bent heavily forward in an awkward stoop; his eyes, normally glinting with jet and clear white, were now a strange rusty-red, at once hot and dull; flecks of foam lay on the dark lips. He had no weapons. Probably in his wandering he had thrown them down as a propitiatory offering to his invisible pursuers. His posture, as he waited motionless, was startlingly like that of a gorilla; indeed, it was impossible not to conceive of him as beyond kinship with man---merely a hulking animal, hunted, tortured, now waiting to attack or be attacked. The blue uniform which clung in tatters about him appeared a bit of trumpery, a farcical masquerade.

Though he realized that this bereft savage could certainly be more dangerous than any of the chimeras he had met in his delirium, Malleson grew steadily calmer. Here at least was solid flesh. He had one pressing worry: had pain, hunger and the loss of blood weakened him beyond capability of defense if the negro proved violent?

Cautiously John rose from his knees, watching warily. The savage made no move. After a moment of giddiness Malleson's head cleared. His legs were shaky but they bore his weight. With no definite purpose but to end the suspense he walked slowly toward the silent figure. Each step cost a painful effort, but he made a determined attempt to disguise his weakness.

"Ami," he said, pointing to his breast, "ami---ami!" He knew that the Senegalese troops spoke a sort of Africo-French when necessary, and that if the reassuring word could penetrate the clouded senses of the negro it would certainly be understood. But the Senegalese showed no glimmer of comprehension; the rusty-red eyes merely flickered a bit. As Malleson approached he saw that the huge body was trembling. He took another step---another. Suddenly the big man uttered a low, sob-like wail, and prostrated himself, hiding his face against the earth. His great hands clasped themselves over his shorn head, the gnarled, wrinkled knuckles snapping with the tension. The broad back was visibly quivering, as he crouched, waiting.

Malleson felt a stab of compassion. The infinite abjectness of this stricken giant was pitiful. Every line of the body sent up its dumb plea for mercy---a plea all the more pathetic because ludicrous; the negro possessed the strength in those huge limbs to break a dozen wounded Mallesons. Removed measureless distances from the white man's world, first by ignorance and now also by madness, the groveling creature seemed placed there as the great archetype of human degradation, the butt of some clowning fate's cruel jest.

Involuntarily he laid his hand on the negro's shoulder; felt the flesh creep under his fingers, and then set into a rigidity like rigor mortis. Indeed, except for his almost inaudible moaning, the man might have been taken for dead.

Suddenly John's compassion changed to disgust and a strange, malignant rage, directed impartially toward himself, the Senegalese, and whatever power had brought them both to the level of futile, suffering animals . . . . And probably because he was in possession of his senses white the other was not, he kicked the inert negro soundly, and turned away.

His giddiness had returned. The trees waltzed crazily before his eyes; his legs now and then gave way under him; he was desperately sick and weary. But that hot anger had welded his will once more. Remembrance of the negro kept his resolution braced.

"They'll never get me down to that," he thought. "They're trying---but they won't!"

This senseless anger did more than reason could have done to keep him moving. But he was helped, too, by certain practical considerations which came in the intervals while he lay resting. Why should a mere arm-wound keep a man from walking to safety?

"You don't know which way to walk. Besides you've lost quarts of blood, and your whole left side hurts like hell," whispered a rational little voice.

"That doesn't matter! I can't be far from help, and they'll search."

"Why don't you shout? Maybe they'll hear you

"No! I'm doing this alone."

"Go on! Call for help! You're foolish. . .

"No! I'll be God damned if I'll call for help. . . "

The rest periods became more frequent and harder to break. By this time the sun was pouring not only light but an enervating heat through the trees. Malleson could no longer keep on his feet. The wound gnawed maddeningly, and finally broke out bleeding again, which seemed to cool the pain. He was but half-conscious; at times all before him was a roaring sea of green. He progressed, sometimes on his knees, sometimes by dragging himself full length over the ground. It was possible to move at all only by setting for himself some near-by mark, and bending all effort toward it---a small bush, the base of a tree, a patch of sunlight. Each time, the goal attained, he lay gasping, his face to the earth. His uniform was shredded; his legs smarted from the scratches of briars; the nails of his right hand were torn and bleeding. These local irritations perhaps spurred his muscles to a kind of galvanic functioning.

"Try to call for help now---just try!" chuckled the malevolent little voice.

Rallying from the very edge of oblivion, Malleson raised his head. Through the mist that swam greenish-black before his eyes he wriggled toward his next milestone, he could not discern what it was; something dark and long, stretching across his path. Five feet distant, perhaps---but miles to him. Yet, after infinite ages, he was near enough to stretch out his fingers and touch it. His chin struck against the ground, a salty-sweet moisture seeped over his parched tongue, where his teeth had cut. He gave a last, determined lurch forward, and unconsciousness wheeled down upon him with a feathery, diminishing murmur like the rustling of a myriad tiny wings.