,
but how gladly would he be a scullery boy forever if he could escape to
the rear where he would hear no more bullets!

His conscience smote him; he wanted a confessor. He had an impulse to
tell the whole truth to Hugo Mallin, for Hugo was the one man in the
company who would sympathetically understand the situation. Yet he did
not find the words, because he was rather pleased with the reclame of
being a hero, which was an entirely new experience in a family that had
been for generations in service.

Hugo Mallin had fired when the others fired; advanced when the others
advanced. He had done his mechanical part in a way that had not excited
Fracasse's further acute displeasure, and he had no sense of physical
fatigue, only of mental depression, of the elemental things that he had
seen and felt this day in a whirling pressure on his brain.

It seemed to him that all his comrades had changed. They could never be
the same as before they had set out to kill another lot of men on the
crest of the knoll. He could not keep a comparison out of mind: One of
the dead Browns, lying in almost the same position, looked enough like
the manufacturer's son to be his brother. He pictured Eugene Aronson's
parents receiving the news of his death--the mother weeping, the father
staring stonily. And he saw many mothers weeping and many fathers
staring stonily.

XXV

THE TERRIBLE NIGHT

The satire of war makes the valet's son a hero; the chance of war kills
the manufacturer's son and lets the day-laborer's son live; the sport of
war gives the latent forces of a Stransky full play; the mercy of war
grants Grandfather Fragini a happy death; the glory of war brings
Dellarme quick promotion; the glamour and the spectacular folly of war
turn the bolts of the lightnings which man has mastered against man.
Perhaps the savage who learned that he could start a flame by rubbing
two dry sticks together may have set fire to the virgin forest and wild
grass in order to destroy an enemy--and naturally with disastrous
results to himself if he mistook the direction of the wind.

Marta Galland's thoughts at dusk when she returned up the steps to the
house were much the same as Hugo Mallin's after Fracasse had taken the
knoll. While he had felt the hot whirlwind of war in his face, she had
witnessed the wreckage that it left. She also was seeing fathers staring
and mothers weeping. Her experience with the wounded drawing deep on the
wells of