pathic. Almost it
seemed that souls were bared to him. These soldiers, quiet, intent, made
up a grim group of men. They seemed slow, thoughtful, plodding, wrapped
and steeped in calm. But Dorn penetrated all this, and established the
relation between it and the nameless and dreadful significance of their
weapons and medals and uniforms and stripes, and the magnificent
vitality that was now all but spent.

Dorn might have resembled a curious, adventure-loving boy, to judge from
his handling of rifles and the way he slipped a strong hand along the
gleaming bayonet-blades. But he was more than the curious youth: he had
begun to grasp a strange, intangible something for which he had no name.
Something that must be attainable for him! Something that, for an hour
or a moment, would make him a fighter not to be slighted by these
supermen!

Whatever his youth or his impelling spirit of manhood, the fact was that
he inspired many of these veterans of the bloody years to Homeric
narratives of the siege of Verdun, of the retreat toward Paris, of the
victory of the Marne, and lastly of the Kaiser's battle, this last and
most awful offensive of the resourceful and frightful foe.

Brunelle told how he was the last survivor of a squad at Verdun who had
been ordered to hold a breach made in a front stone wall along the out
posts. How they had faced a bombardment of heavy guns--a whistling,
shrieking, thundering roar, pierced by the higher explosion of a
bursting shell--smoke and sulphur and gas--the crumbling of walls and
downward fling of shrapnel. How the lives of soldiers were as lives of
gnats hurled by wind and burned by flame. Death had a manifold and
horrible diversity. A soldier's head, with ghastly face and conscious
eyes, momentarily poised in the air while the body rode away invisibly
with an exploding shell! He told of men blown up, shot through and
riddled and brained and disemboweled, while their comrades, grim and
unalterable, standing in a stream of blood, lived through the rain of
shells, the smashing of walls, lived to fight like madmen the detachment
following the bombardment, and to kill them every one.

Mathie told of the great retreat--how men who had fought for days, who
were unbeaten and unafraid, had obeyed an order they hated and could not
understand, and had marched day and night, day and night, eating as they
toiled on, sleeping while they marched, on and on, bloody-footed,
desperate, and terrible, fille