causing a great cloud of dust
from which arose the screams of men and horses.

"Come and see," said Oro.

We were there. Out of the cloud of dust appeared one man galloping
furiously. He was a young fellow who, as I noted, had turned his head
away and hidden his eyes with his hand when the horror was done yonder.
All the others were dead except the officer who had worked the deed. He
was still living, but both his hands and one of his feet had been blown
away. Presently he died, screaming to God for mercy.

We passed on and came to a barn with wide doors that swung a little in
the wind, causing the rusted hinges to scream like a creature in pain.
On each of these doors hung a dead man crucified. The hat of one of
them lay upon the ground, and I knew from the shape of it that he was a
Colonial soldier.

"Did you not tell me," said Oro after surveying them, "that these
Germans are of your Christian faith?"

"Yes; and the Name of God is always on their ruler's lips."

"Ah!" he said, "I am glad that I worship Fate. Bastin the priest need
trouble me no more."

"There is something behind Fate," I said, quoting Bastin himself.

"Perhaps. So indeed I have always held, but after much study I cannot
understand the manner of its working. Fate is enough for me."

We went on and came to a flat country that was lined with ditches, all
of them full of men, Germans on one side, English and French upon the
other. A terrible bombardment shook the earth, the shells raining upon
the ditches. Presently that from the English guns ceased and out of the
trenches in front of them thousands of men were vomited, who ran forward
through a hail of fire in which scores and hundreds fell, across an open
piece of ground that was pitted with shell craters. They came to barbed
wire defenses, or what remained of them, cut the wire with nippers and
pulled up the posts. Then through the gaps they surged in, shouting and
hurling hand grenades. They reached the German trenches, they leapt into
them and from those holes arose a hellish din. Pistols were fired and
everywhere bayonets flashed.

Behind them rushed a horde of little, dark-skinned men, Indians who
carried great knives in their hands. Those leapt over the first trench
and running on with wild yells, dived into the second, those who were
left of them, and there began hacking with their knives at the defenders
and the soldiers who worked the spitting maxim guns. In twenty minutes
it was o