d with burning thirst and the agony of
ceaseless motion, on with dragging legs and laboring breasts and
red-hazed eyes, on and onward, unquenchable, with the spirit of France.

Sergeant Delorme spoke of the sudden fierce about-face at the Marne, of
the irresistible onslaught of men whose homes had been invaded, whose
children had been murdered, whose women had been enslaved, of a ruthless
fighting, swift and deadly, and lastly of a bayonet charge by his own
division, running down upon superior numbers, engaging them in
hand-to-hand conflict, malignant and fatal, routing them over a field of
blood and death.

"Monsieur Dorn, do you know the French use of a bayonet?" asked Delorme.

"No," replied Dorn.

"_Allons!_ I will show you," he said, taking up two rifles and handing
one to Dorn. "Come. It is so--and so--a trick. The boches can't face
cold steel.... Ah, monsieur, you have the supple wrists of a juggler!
You have the arms of a giant! You have the eyes of a duelist! You will
be one grand spitter of German pigs!"

Dorn felt the blanching of his face, the tingling of his nerves, the
tightening of his muscles. A cold and terrible meaning laid hold of him
even in the instant when he trembled before this flaming-eyed French
veteran who complimented him while he instructed. How easily, Dorn
thought, could this soldier slip the bright bayonet over his guard and
pierce him from breast to back! How horrible the proximity of that
sinister blade, with its glint, its turn, its edge, so potently
expressive of its history! Even as Dorn crossed bayonets with this
inspired Frenchman he heard a soldier comrade say that Delorme had let
daylight through fourteen boches in that memorable victory of the Marne.

"You are very big and strong and quick, monsieur," said the officer
Huon, simply. "In bayonet-work you will be a killer of boches."

In their talk and practice and help, in their intent to encourage the
young American soldier, these Blue Devils one and all dealt in frank and
inevitable terms of death. That was their meaning in life. It was
immeasurably horrible for Dorn, because it seemed a realization of his
imagined visions. He felt like a child among old savages of a war tribe.
Yet he was fascinated by this close-up suggestion of man to man in
battle, of German to American, of materialist to idealist, and beyond
all control was the bursting surge of his blood. The exercises he had
gone through, the trick he had acquired,