audience.

He had been motored through a timber-patched country of waving wheat
fields and had listened to the deep voices of the guns. He had been
taken into the trenches where he read the spirit of decay in sullen eyes
that had once been stolidly impassive or cheerfully childlike. He had
seen the "little and terrible keyholes of heaven and hell" through which
one looks, both sickened and exalted, upon modern warfare.

In his mind, still unassimilated, were countless impressions, gruesome
and inspiring, petty and magnificent, appalling and ennobling;
impressions of broken men and broken villages, of pock-marked country
and unbruised valour. As the battered military car, mud-brown over its
gray, wallowed back from the front lines, he seemed to be leaving the
war behind him, though he knew that he was approaching the nerve centre
from which emanated the impulses which forged and wrought the purposes
of the Inferno.

Finally in a village less hideously war-spoiled than its fellows, and in
a small but tidy room of what had been the inn, he awaited the pleasure
of the Commander.

Of his conductor along the front he had put questions as to General
Makailoff. Yes, the officer, of course, knew of the General, but where
he was now he could not say.

The General was a wheel in the mechanism of Brussilov's staff--and that
directing force was remote from the lives of lower grade officers. It
belonged to the part of the temple which lay behind the veil. Even in
attempted description of the man, the intelligence officer grew vague,
and Boone did not press him for a greater explicitness. That military
reticence that no civilian could justly appraise might be parent to the
officer's indefinite responses, and, if so, its covertness must be
respected.

So in the room of the Russian inn the man from the Cumberlands waited,
and at length, when he opened his door in response to a light rap, he
saw an officer in a major's uniform, who saluted smartly and announced
in excellent English,

"General Brussilov will receive you now, sir."

Again a battered military car lurched through village streets darkening
to twilight, and brought up before a plain two-storied house, whose
walls, though shell marked, stood upright.

Into a whitewashed room, littered with map-strewn tables, and empty
until they entered it, Boone was ushered and left alone.

A lamp upon a crude table stood as yet unkindled, and only candles in
two tall sticks on a