ing by a fire, and falling into a dream.... He sang
of our fathers and our boyhood; the good fathers who taught us all they
knew, and whipped us with patience and the fear of God. He sang of the
savory kitchen and the red fire-lit windows (bins full of corn and boxes
high with wood); of the gray winter and the children of our house, the
smell of wood-smoke and the low singing of the tea-kettle on the hearth.

And the officers followed him along the trenches, crying to us,
"_Prepare to charge_!"

He sang of the ice breaking in the rivers--the groan of ice rotting in
the lakes under the softness of the new life--of the frost coming up
out of the fallows, leaving them wet-black and gleaming-rich. He sang
of Spring, the spring-plowing, the heaviness of our labor, with spring
lust in our veins, and the crude love in our hearts which we could only
articulate in kisses and passion.

A roar from us at that--for the forgotten world was rushing home--the
world of our maidens and our women.... He sang of the churches--sang of
Poland, sang of Finland--of the churches and the long Sabbaths, the
ministry of the gentle, irresistible Christ, of the Mary who mothered
Him and mothered us all.

We were roaring like school-boys now behind him--the officer-men
shouting to us to stand in our places and prepare to charge.

... He was singing of the Spring again--of the warm breath that comes
up over the hills and plains--even to _our_ little fields. On he went
singing, and I followed like a dog or a child--hundreds of others
following--the menacing voices just stabbing in through the song of
open weather and the smell of the ground.... My father had sung it to
me--the song of the soil, the song _from_ the soil. And the smell of
the stables came home, and the ruminating cattle at evening, the warm
smell of the milking and the red that shot the dusk.... My mother taking
the pails in the purple evening.

And this about us was the soldiery of Russia--the reek of powder, the
iron frost, and the dead that moved for our eyes in the dip of the white
valley. And each of us saw _our_ field, our low earth-thatched barns,
and each of us saw our mothers, and every man's father sang.... We cried
to him, when he halted a moment--and our hearts, they were burning in
his steps--burning, and not with hatred.

Now he sang of the Springtime--and, my God--of our maidens! On the
road from her house, I had sung it--coming home in the night from her
house--w