'm American," replied Dorn, simply, and he met that
soul-searching black gaze with all his intense and fearless spirit. Dorn
felt that never in his life had he been subjected to such a test of his
manhood, of his truth.

"My name's Huon," said the officer, and he extended one of the huge
deformed hands.

"Mine's Dorn," replied Kurt, meeting that hand with his own.

Whereupon the Frenchman spoke rapidly to the comrade nearest him, so
rapidly that all Kurt could make of what he said was that here was an
American soldier with a new idea. They drew closer, and it became
manifest that the interesting idea was Kurt's news about the American
army. It was news here, and carefully pondered by these Frenchmen, as
slowly one by one they questioned him. They doubted, but Dorn convinced
them. They seemed to like his talk and his looks. Dorn's quick faculties
grasped the simplicity of these soldiers. After three terrible years of
unprecedented warfare, during which they had performed the impossible,
they did not want a fresh army to come along and steal their glory by
administering a final blow to a tottering enemy. Gazing into those
strange, seared faces, beginning to see behind the iron mask, Dorn
learned the one thing a soldier lives, fights, and dies for--glory.

Kurt Dorn was soon made welcome. He was made to exhaust his knowledge of
French. He was studied by eyes that had gleamed in the face of death.
His hand was wrung by hands that had dealt death. How terribly he felt
that! And presently, when his excitement and emotion had subsided to the
extent that he could really see what he looked at, then came the reward
of reality, with all its incalculable meaning expressed to him in the
gleaming bayonets, in the worn accoutrements, in the greatcoats like
clapboards of mud, in the hands that were claws, in the feet that
hobbled, in the strange, wonderful significance of bodily presence,
standing there as proof of valor, of man's limitless endurance. In the
faces, ah! there Dorn read the history that made him shudder and lifted
him beyond himself. For there in those still, dark faces, of boys grown
old in three years, shone the terror of war and the spirit that had
resisted it.

Dorn, in his intensity, in the over-emotion of his self-centered
passion, so terribly driven to prove to himself something vague yet
all-powerful, illusive yet imperious, divined what these Blue Devil
soldiers had been through. His mind was more than tele