ld the rest.

"Division headquarters!" called the operator. "They're getting brigade
headquarters," he added while he waited in silence. "Brigade
headquarters says the Braves have no wire. It's too late. The charge is
starting."

"So it is!" cried one of the subalterns. "Look! Look!"

Marta looked toward the rising ground this side of the knoll in time to
see bayonets flash in the waning afternoon sunlight and disappear as
they descended the slope.

"There! They're up on the other slope without stopping!" exclaimed the
general. "Quick! Don't you want to see?" He offered his glasses to
Marta.

"No, I can see well enough," she murmured, though the landscape was
moving before her eyes in giddy waves.

"The madness of it! The whole slope is peppered with the fallen!"

"What a cost! Magnificent, but not war. Carrying their flag in the good
old way, right at the front!"

"Heavens! I hope they do it!"

"The flag's down!"

"Another man has it--it's up!"

"Now--now--splendid! They're in!"

"So they are! And the flag, too!"

"Yes, what's left are in!"

"And Lanstron was there--in that!"

"What if--"

"Yes, the chief of staff, the head of the army, in an affair like that!"

"The mind of the army--the mind that was to direct our advance!"

"When all the honors of the world are his!"

Their words were acid-tipped needles knitting back and forth through
Marta's brain. Was Lanny one of those black specks that peppered the
slope? Was he? Was he?

"Telephone and--and see if Lanny is--is killed!" she begged.

She knew not how she uttered that monstrous word killed. But utter it
she did in its naked terror. Now she knew a simpler feeling than that of
the grand sympathy of the dreamer with the horrors of war as a whole.
She knew the dumb, helpless suspense of the womenfolk remaining at home
watching for the casualty lists that Westerling had suppressed. What
mattered policies of statesmen and generals, propagandas and tactics, to
them? The concern of each wife or sweetheart was with one--one of the
millions who was greater to the wife or the sweetheart than all the
millions. Marta was not thinking of sending thousands to death. Had she
sent _him_ to death? The agony of waiting, waiting there among these
strangers, waiting for that little instrument at the end of a wire to
say whether or not he were alive, became insupportable.

"I'll go--I'll go out there where he is!" she said incoherently, still
looking towa