tonight, to do
as I would do were my duty not back here!"

A strange feeling of warmth and strength passed through Jeb's veins, but
he was given no time for reply, because this man of iron turned to the
assembled unit, shouting:

"At dawn this curtain of shells will be lifted and dropped on the Boche
second line. That instant our boys go over the top, across No Man's
Land. But Germans burrow under ground in a _barrage_, or run out forward
and lie down to escape it; so there will still be many with machine-guns
left to rake the open stretch, and not all of our brave fellows will get
across. It is those," he added, in a voice of thunder, "whom the good
God expects us to bring in!"

There was no disobeying this man. Jeb felt sick through and through, but
as the others filed out, every second one with a folded stretcher, he,
also, followed. Yet he wanted to hold back; he wanted to dash into the
darkest niche of the dug-out, bury his face there and--well, die! To
die at once, outright, was preferable to the mental torture of expected
laceration and suffering; nor could even the great Bonsecours have
convinced him that these two monsters were not crouching, waiting
especially for the moment when he should step forth.

While the dressing-station shelters opened into a roomy quadrangle, that
in turn connected with trenches, there had also been cut narrow roadways
up past the side of each dug-out, ascending sharply toward the front. By
this rough and gravelly, though more direct, means, stretcher-bearers
could be upon the crest in a twinkling, thence forward and downward over
narrow bridges spanning the first line trench to No Man's Land itself.

As the stretcher-bearers of Barrow's unit poured out beneath the sky--or
what would have been a sky had not incarnate fiends usurped it--Jeb
found himself moving next to Bonsecours. Even in this strain, when men
were thinking in terms of armies, the famous surgeon with infinite tact
went about supporting the props of one human atom. After all, he had
been trained to mend one man at a time! He spoke no word until they had
climbed the sloping roadway and laid flat, peeping over; then, with his
lips close to Jeb's ear, he shouted:

"Have no fear! When man calls on the highest expression of his will, he
becomes indomitable; he succeeds in the highest terms of success--and
thus will you succeed, _mon pauvre enfant_! Look!"

He sprang up, pointing where the fringe of that French fire c