terrible scream, and squatted
down, covering her face with her hands. Madame Joubert came out
to chide her.

"What is the matter with that child?" Claude asked as they
hurried out of the gate. "Do you suppose she was hurt, or abused
in some way?"

"Terrorized. She often screams like that at night. Haven't you
heard her? They have to go and wake her, to stop it. She doesn't
speak any French; only Walloon. And she can't or won't learn, so
they can't tell what goes on in her poor little head."

In the two weeks of intensive training that followed, Claude
marvelled at Gerhardt's spirit and endurance. The muscular strain
of mimic trench operations was more of a tax on him than on any
of the other officers. He was as tall as Claude, but he weighed
only a hundred and forty-six pounds, and he had not been roughly
bred like most of the others. When his fellow officers learned
that he was a violinist by profession, that he could have had a
soft job as interpreter or as an organizer of camp
entertainments, they no longer resented his reserve or his
occasional superciliousness. They respected a man who could have
wriggled out and didn't.

VII

On the march at last; through a brilliant August day Colonel
Scott's battalion was streaming along one of the dusty,
well-worn roads east of the Somme, their railway base well behind
them. The way led through rolling country; fields, hills, woods,
little villages shattered but still habitable, where the people
came out to watch the soldiers go by.

The Americans went through every village in march step, colours
flying, the band playing, "to show that the morale was high," as
the officers said. Claude trudged on the outside of the
column,--now at the front of his company, now at the
rear,--wearing a stoical countenance, afraid of betraying his
satisfaction in the men, the weather, the country.

They were bound for the big show, and on every hand were
reassuring signs: long lines of gaunt, dead trees, charred and
torn; big holes gashed out in fields and hillsides, already half
concealed by new undergrowth; winding depressions in the earth,
bodies of wrecked motor-trucks and automobiles lying along the
road, and everywhere endless straggling lines of rusty
barbed-wire, that seemed to have been put there by chance,--with
no purpose at all.

"Begins to look like we're getting in, Lieutenant," said Sergeant
Hicks, smiling behind his salute.

Claude nodded and passed forward.

"W