hat the men realized it. In another age,
when education was not so common and unthinking, unforeseeing passion
could be aroused in ignorant minds, a stimulant on an empty stomach
might have made them animals, oblivious to danger. They were about to
offer their lives to pave the way for others to reach the works that
none of them, probably, would ever reach. For the like of this, in
gathering the enemy's spears to his breast, a saga had risen around one
national hero. But Fracasse's veterans were only the shivering units of
the millions; the part of the machine that happened to be the first to
strike another machine in collision. Such was the end of all the
training, the marching, the drilling in the gallant business of arms,
with no more romance or glory than beeves going to the slaughter.

"You'll be the first out into the glacis, the first into the enemy's
redoubt," said the colonel, forcing a tone of good, old-fashioned
"up-guards-and-at-'em" vigor, as he touched the bronze cross on
Peterkin's breast with his forefinger.

Little Peterkin, always pale but not so pale now as his comrades,
flushed at the distinction.

"Yes, sir!" and he saluted.

In his eyes was the exaltation of his simple-minded faith. He did not
think too much. What more could kings and conquerors ask than such a
soldier as the valet's son, secure in the belief that his charmed life
would bring him through the assault unharmed?

"My God! I can't!" exclaimed the banker's son. "I've suffered enough.
There's life and wealth and all that it gives waiting for me at home!
I'm young--I can't!"

There was a rustle of bodies in a restless movement of drawn breaths at
common thought taking form, desperately fraught with alarm to Fracasse.

"You will!" Fracasse said, thrusting his revolver muzzle against the
ribs of the banker's son. "If you don't, I'll shoot you dead, or you'll
be trampled to death by the rush from the rear!"

The wedge point may not strike back at the hammer that drives it. Close
packed behind Fracasse's company was a seemingly limitless mass of
soldiery, palpitant with their short breaths, a steamy, sickening odor
rising from their water-soaked clothes. Here were men so wet, so tired,
so nerve-worn that they did not care when death came; men who wanted to
curse and strike out against their fate; men who wanted to turn in
flight, their natural impulse held down by the bonds of discipline and
that pride of fellowship which is shamed t