e dead and wounded
were piling up fast in the driving snow, but the willing servants of an
emperor came on as steadily as ever to be killed. So much slaughter for
so little purpose! The height of battle, excitement and danger, could
not keep him from thinking of it.

Occasionally a man fell in the trench and lay in the mud and snow, but
the others never ceased for a moment to send bullets into the gray
masses which fell back only to come on again. Nothing but modern
weapons, machine guns from which missiles fairly flowed in an unending
stream, and rifles which a man fired as fast as he could pull the
trigger could check them. "Why don't they stop! Why don't they stop!"
John was shouting to himself through burned lips, and again he shuddered
with sick horror, when he saw a whole line of men blown away, as if they
had been grain swept by a tornado.

Once they came to the very edge of the trench to be slain there, and
the body of a German fell in at John's very feet. He never knew how many
times they charged, but human flesh and blood must yield, in the end,
before unyielding steel, and at last through the crash and confusion the
notes of trumpets sounded. Then the German masses melted away and the
heavy white gloom once more enveloped the ground before the trenches
from which came faint cries. The wounded lay thickly there with the
dead, but neither side dared to go for them. An upright human figure
would draw at once a hail of bullets.

Several machine guns still purred and crackled, but no reply came.
Presently they, too, ceased, and the silence in front was complete, save
for the faint groans and the swish of the drifting snow. John shivered,
and it was not with cold. His feeling of horror was increasing. Many men
had been killed and as many maimed, and he was sure that all of them had
fallen for nothing.

"It's a victory," said Carstairs, "isolated and detached, but a victory
nevertheless."

"So it is," said John, "but it's just a little segment on a vast curving
line of four hundred miles. Maybe the Germans have taken a trench
somewhere else."

"And maybe we have, at yet another point. This isn't much like the war
we've read about, is it, Scott? A great battlefield, vast batteries
blazing, long lines of infantry in brilliant uniforms advancing, twenty
thousand cavalry charging at the gallop the earth reeling under the
hoofs of their horses!"

"No, it's just murder in the dark."

[Illustration: "Once they c