nk of the Braves. It was not wonderful to them
that he should be there. This complicated business of running a war over
a telephone was not in the ken of their calculations. The colonel was
with them, so all the generals ought to be. "We'll show Lanstron!"
determined the Braves. "We'll show him how we fight in Africa!"

"With the first rush you go to the bottom of the valley; with the
second, take the knoll!" Such were the colonel's simple tactics. "But
stop on the top of the knoll. Though we'd like to take the capital this
afternoon, it's against orders."

Lanstron, dropping into place in the line, felt as if he were about to
renew his youth. He had the elation of his early aeroplane flights, when
he was likely to be hung on a church steeple. Now he was not sending men
to death; he was having his personal fling. It was all very simple
beside sitting at a desk with battle raging in the distance. He dodged
at the first bullet that whistled near his head and looked rather
sheepishly at the man next him, who was grinning.

"Lots of fellows do that with the first one, no matter how many times
they've been under fire," said the comrade. "But if they do it with the
second one--" He dropped the corners of his mouth with a significance
that required no further comment to express his views on that kind of a
soldier.

"I shan't!" said Lanstron; and he kept his word.

"I knew by the cut of your jib you wouldn't!" observed the Brave,
speaking not to the chief of staff but to the man. What were chiefs of
staff to him? Everybody on the firing-line was simply another Brave.

Lanstron liked the compliment. It pleased him better than those endowing
him with military genius. It was free of rank and etiquette and
selfishness.

Of such stuff were the Braves as Caesar's veterans who walloped the
Belgae, the adventurous ruffians of Cortez, the swashbucklers who fought
in Flanders, the followers of Bonnie Prince Charlie, and the regulars of
the American Indian campaigns. When they rose to the charge with a yell,
in a wave of scarlet and blue, flashing with brass buttons, their silken
flag rippling in the front rank, they made a picture to please the
romantic taste. Here on the brown background of the commonplace three
millions of moderns was a patch of the color and glamour that
story-tellers, poets, artists, and moving-picture men would choose as
the theme of real military glory.

Intoxication of all the senses, of muscles and nerve