d
gradually grew stronger. The dawn of another day was close at hand. It
broke as if reluctantly, cold and gray and sunless.

The detachment of United States troops halted for camp outside of the
French village of A----.

Kurt Dorn was at mess with his squad.

The months in France had flown away on wings of training and absorbing
and waiting. Dorn had changed incalculably. But all he realized of it
was that he weighed one hundred and ninety pounds and that he seemed to
have lived a hundred swift lives. All that he saw and felt became part
of him. His comrades had been won to him as friends by virtue of his
ever-ready helping hand, by his devotion to training, by his
close-lipped acceptance of all the toils and knocks and pains common to
the making of a soldier. The squad lived together as one large family of
brothers. Dorn's comrades had at first tormented him with his German
name; they had made fun of his abstraction and his letter-writing; they
had misunderstood his aloofness. But the ridicule died away, and now, in
the presaged nature of events, his comrades, all governed by the
physical life of the soldier, took him for a man.

Perhaps it might have been chance, or it might have been true of all the
American squads, but the fact was that Dorn's squad was a strangely
assorted set of young men. Perhaps that might have been Dorn's
conviction from coming to live long with them. They were a part of the
New York Division of the --th, all supposed to be New York men. As a
matter of fact, this was not true. Dorn was a native of Washington.
Sanborn was a thick-set, sturdy fellow with the clear brown tan and
clear brown eyes of the Californian. Brewer was from South Carolina, a
lean, lanky Southerner, with deep-set dark eyes. Dixon hailed from
Massachusetts, from a fighting family, and from Harvard, where he had
been a noted athlete. He was a big, lithe, handsome boy, red-faced and
curly-haired. Purcell was a New-Yorker, of rich family, highly
connected, and his easy, clean, fine ways, with the elegance of his
person, his blond distinction, made him stand out from his khaki-clad
comrades, though he was clad identically with them. Rogers claimed the
Bronx to be his home and he was proud of it. He was little, almost
undersized, but a knot of muscle, a keen-faced youth with Irish blood in
him. These particular soldiers of the squad were closest to Dorn.

Corporal Bob Owens came swinging in to throw his sombrero down.

"Wh