ad not heard a doctor remark:

"It's awful--inconceivable! Not a hospital tent in this division is
unoccupied. Most of the houses in town are full, and we're preparing for
another grand attack!"

Now for two days the guns kept up their roar.

"Making ready for the infantry to go in," ran the talk around the
barracks yard.

After the infantry had gone in and the result was known, the doctor on
his morning round said to the judge's son:

"You're pretty pale yet, but you'll do. We must make room for a big
crowd that is coming and the orders are to get every man who is in any
condition to fight to the front."

"And if I get another hole in me you'll patch me up again?"

"Get any number and we'll patch you up if they're in the right place,"
was the answer. "But be careful about that detail."

Soon the judge's son was with a score of convalescents who were marched
down to the town, where they formed in column with other detachments.

"Not with that cough!" exclaimed a doctor as they were about to start,
ordering a man out of line. "You'd never get to the front. You'd only
have to be brought back in an ambulance."

An enlightening march this for the judge's son from hospital to
trenches, moving with a tide of loaded commissariat wagons and empty
ambulances and passing a tide of loaded ambulances and empty
commissariat wagons. A like scene was on every road to the front; a like
scene on every vista of landscape along any part of the frontier. All
trees and bushes and walls and buildings that would give cover to the
enemy the Browns had razed. On every point of rising ground were the
trenches and redoubts that the Browns had yielded after their purpose of
making the Grays earn their way by trenches of their own had been
served. The fields were trampled by the feet of infantry, cut by gun
wheels, ploughed by shells, and sown with the conical nickel pellets
from rifles and the round lead bullets of shrapnel. An escarpment of
rock, where the road-bed was slashed into a hillside in a sharp turn,
struck by the concentrated fire of automatics, appeared to have been
beaten by thousands of sharp-headed hammers, leaving a pile of chips and
dust.

The traffic of the main roads spread into branch roads which ended in
the ganglia of supply depots, all kept in touch by the network of wires
focussing through different headquarters to Westerling. In this
conquered territory with its face of desolation there were no fighting
men e