dying in that
orgy of male ferocity. It was like a chemical precipitate clearing muddy
water. Their wild glances saw a woman's features in exaltation and in
her eyes something as definite as the fire of command. She was shaming
them for their unmanliness; shaming their panic--the foolish panic at a
theatre exit--and giving orders as if that were her part and theirs was
to obey; a woman to soldiers, the weak sex to the strong. They did obey,
under the spell of the amazing fact of her presence, in the relief of
having some simple human purpose to cling to.

After the work was begun they needed no urging to carry the wounded up
the terrace steps; and men who had knocked down and trampled on the
wounded were gentle with them now, under the guidance of better
impulses. How could they falter directed by a woman unmindful of
occasional shells and bullet whistles? They begged her to go back to
the house; this was no place for her.

But Marta did not want safety. Danger was sweet; it was expiation. She
was helping, actually helping; that was enough. She envied the peaceful
dead--they had no nightmares--as she aided the doctors in separating the
bodies that were still breathing from those that were not; and she
steeled herself against every ghastly sight save one, that of a man
lying with his legs pinned under a wagon body. His jaw had been shot
away. Slowly he was bleeding to death, but he did not realize it. He
realized nothing in his delirium except the nature of his wound. He was
dipping his finger in the cavity and, dab by dab, writing "Kill me!" on
the wagon body. It sent reeling waves of red before her eyes. Then a
shell burst near her and a doctor cried out:

"She's hit!"

But Marta did not hear him. She heard only the dreadful crack of the
splitting shrapnel jacket. She had a sense of falling, and that was all.

The next that she knew she was in a long chair on the veranda and the
vague shadows bending over her gradually identified themselves as her
mother and Minna.

"I remember when you were telling of the last war that you didn't swoon
at the sight of the wounded, mother," Marta whispered.

"But I was not wounded," replied Mrs Galland.

Marta ceased to be only a consciousness swimming in a haze. With the
return of her faculties, she noticed that both her mother and Minna were
looking significantly at her forearm; so she looked at it, too. It was
bandaged.

"A cut from a shrapnel fragment," said a doctor. "N