xcept reserves or convalescents on their way to the front. All the
rest were wounded or dead or occupied in the routine of supply and
intelligence. The organization which had been drilled through two
generations of peace for this emergency exhibited the signs of pressure.

Eyes that met when commands were given and received were dull from want
of sleep or hectically bright as a hypochondriac's. Voices spoke in a
grim, tired monotone, broken by sudden flashes of irritation or
eruptions of anger. Features were drawn like those of rowers against a
tide. The very proportions of the ghastly harvest after the last, the
heaviest of all, of the attacks brought spasms of nausea to men already
hardened to blood and death. If the officers of the staffs in their
official conspiracy of silence would not talk, the privates and the
wounded would. The judge's son, observing, listening, thinking, was
gathering a story to tell his comrades of Company B of the 128th.

That night he and his comrade convalescents slept in the open. Their
bodies were huddled close together under their blankets for warmth,
while aching limbs twitched from the fatigue of the march. The morning
showed that others had coughs which should have kept them from the
front.

"Four or five cases of pneumonia due in that lot!" a doctor remarked to
a hospital-corps sergeant. "Put them in empties right away."

After this announcement other coughs developed. Amusing, these sudden,
purposeful efforts should one happen to think of them in that way. But
no one did.

"No you don't, you malingerers!" said the doctor sharply. "I've been at
this business long enough to know a real cough."

Now the judge's son and a dozen others were separated from the rest of
their companions and started over a hill. From the top they had a broad
view. Across a strip of valley lay the main rise to the heights of the
range. Along the summit nothing warlike was visible except the irregular
landscape against the horizon. There the enemy rested in his
fortifications. The slopes, as far as the judge's son could see on
either hand, were like the warrens of an overpopulated rabbit world in
hiding. Here was the army of the Grays in its redoubts and trenches A
thousand times as many men as were ever at work on the Panama Canal had
been digging their way forward--digging regardless of union hours;
digging to save their own lives and to take lives. And the nearer they
came to the top of the range the