ics among the millions of
home-trained comrades. They didn't quite believe in all this machine
business. Down the slopes with their veteran stride, loose-limbed and
rhythmic, they went, past the line of the Galland house, with no
fighting in sight. What if they had to return to Africa without firing a
shot? The lugubrious prospect saddened them. They felt that a battle
should be ordered on their account.

"You will take that regiment's place and it will fall back for support,
while you storm the knoll beyond!" said the brigade commander, a twinkle
in his eye.

"Is it much of a job, do you think?" asked the colonel of the Braves.

He had two fingers' length of service colors on his blouse. Lean he was
and bony-jawed, with deep-set eyes. He loved every mother's son of the
Braves, from illiterate to the chanter of the "Odyssey"; from peasant's
son to penniless nobleman, and thought any one of his privates rather
superior to a home brigade commander.

"A pretty good deal. I think the Grays'll make a snappy resistance,"
said the brigade commander honestly. "The way we feel them out, they're
getting back their wind, and for the first time we'll be fighting them
up-hill. Yes, there's a sting in a retreating army's tail when it gets
over its demoralization."

"Good!" observed the colonel as if he had a sweet taste in his mouth.

"And if you find it too stiff," the brigade commander went on, "why,
I've seasoned veterans back of you who will press in to your support."

"Veterans, you say, and seasoned? I have some of my own, too! Thank you!
Thank you most kindly!" said the colonel, saluting stiffly, with a twist
to the corner of his mouth. "When we need their help it will be to bury
our dead," he added. "Can we do it alone? Will we?"

He passed these inquiries along the line, which rose to the suggestion
with different kinds of oaths and jests and grins and grim whistles. The
scholar suddenly transferred his affections from the Greeks' phalanx to
the Roman legions and began with the first verse of Virgil's "AEneid." He
always made the change when action was near. "The Greeks for poetry and
the Romans for war!" he declared, and could argue his company to sleep
if anybody disputed him.

"I want to be in one fight. I haven't been under fire in the whole war,"
Lanstron explained to the colonel, who understood precisely the feeling.

"Lanstron is with us! The chief of staff is watching us!" ran the
whisper from flank to fla