en two lines of
fire. There was no escape. Some of the wounded had a mercifully quick
end, others suffered the consciousness of being hit again and again; the
dead were bored through with bullet holes. In torture, the survivors
prayed for death; for all had to die except Peterkin, the pasty-faced
little valet's son.

Peterkin was quite safe, hugging the bottom of the shell crater under a
swarm of hornets. In a surprisingly short time he became accustomed to
the situation and found himself ravenously hungry, for the strain of the
last twelve hours had burned up tissue. He took a biscuit out of his
knapsack and began nibbling it, as became a true rodent.

XX

MARTA'S FIRST GLIMPSE OF WAR

As Marta and the children came to the door of the chapel after the
recitation of the oath, she saw the civil population moving along the
street in the direction of the range. Suddenly they paused in a common
impulse and their heads turned as one head on the fulcrum of their
necks, and their faces as one face in a set stare looked skyward.

"Keep on moving! No danger!" called the major of the brigade staff.
"Pass the word--no danger! It's not going to drop any bombs; it's only a
scout plane trying to locate the positions of the defences we've thrown
up overnight. No danger--keep moving!"

He might as well have tried to distract the attention of the grand stand
from the finish of a horse-race. More than the wizard's spell, years
before, at the first sight of man in flight held them in suspense as
they watched a plane approaching with the speed of an albatross down the
wind straight on a line with the church tower where the sharpshooters
were posted. The spread of the wings grew broader; the motor was making
a circle of light as large as a man's hat-box, and the aviator was the
size of some enormous insect when three or four sharp reports were
audible from the church tower.

Still the plane came on intact over the spire. The sharpshooters had
only rimmed the target, without injury to braces or engine. But they had
another chance from the windows on the nearer side of the tower; and the
crowd saw there the glint of rifle barrels. This time they got the
bull's-eye. The aviator reeled and dropped sidewise, a dead weight
caught by the braces, with his arm dangling. A teetering dip of the
plane and his body was shaken free. His face, as he neared the earth in
his descent, bore the surprised look of a man thumped on the back
unex