urtain
touched this great stage. The blinding lights flickered over his face
and made him supreme at that moment. In the continuous, head-splitting
noises of three thousand shells per minute, bursting on an eight-mile
segment, he looked more like a war god than an agent of mercy.

The German position was crumbling--rather, it was being blasted out of
existence. To Jeb it might have marked the very brink of hell. The
flashes were almost as a steady white and greenish-orange blaze, and
showed the earth spurting in great bunches upward; stiff winds that had
sent clouds scurrying the day before now caught the ground smoke and
drew it, as a sweeping prairie fire, back upon the enemy. This was a
propitious wind, and on its wings the death gas sped.

Between the armies lay No Man's Land in utter desolation, but each
little detail, each inconspicuous bit of wreckage left from earlier
struggles, stood boldly outlined in the calcium glare. This was the
stretch of ground he would be searching when the curtain lifted--except
that its surface would then be strewn with men; some drawn up in pain,
some moaning, some whimpering, some cursing, some terribly still. Had
ever a curtain lifted on more poignant tragedy! Was there a parallel in
crime to this wholesale slaughter which a treacherous nation thrust upon
a peaceful world! Jeb tried to wonder how many dead might be there, but
found that his mind would not leave the point of destruction; it had
become riveted, as a bird is said to be mesmerized by a slowly
approaching snake.

Lying just behind the ridge, feeling the earth tremble beneath his body,
waiting for Bonsecours' command to dash into that cockpit of suffering
and there mingle with the torn, the dying and the dead, he repeated
over and over the great surgeon's words which bit into him like acid:
"It is those whom the good God expects us to bring in!"

The dawn was coming! No sun appeared, but the flashes grew less
blinding; the ground close to his face began to show natural browns
where formerly had been flickering greens, and his hands looked more
alive than dead. Also did the whole scene change as sky and earth
increased their fury in this blending of the real and unreal; for, now
added to the noises and fitful lights, were huge balls of white smoke,
and brown, springing into quick existence; some expanded to balloon size
and swept majestically onward, upward; some, caught in a vortex of
madness,--swirling, writhing, da