and
rest were the sweetest blessings upon the earth, and they could not
grasp them. No more could they grasp them than could the gaping
civilians and the distinguished travelers grasp what these grand hulks
of veteran soldiers had done. Once a group of civilians halted near the
soldiers. An officer was their escort. He tried to hurry them on, but
failed. Delorme edged away into the gloomy, damp barn rather than meet
such visitors. Some of his comrades followed suit. Ferier, the
incomparable of the Blue Devils, the wearer of all the French medals and
the bearer of twenty-five wounds received in battle--he sneaked away,
afraid and humble and sullen, to hide himself from the curious. That
action of Ferier's was a revelation to Dorn. He felt a sting of shame.
There were two classes of people in relation to this war--those who went
to fight and those who stayed behind. What had Delorme or Mathie or
Ferier to do with the world of selfish, comfortable, well-fed men? Dorn
heard a million voices of France crying out the bitter truth--that if
these war-bowed veterans ever returned alive to their homes it would be
with hopes and hearts and faiths burned out, with hands forever lost to
their old use, with bodies that the war had robbed.

Dorn bade his new-made friends adieu, and in the darkening twilight he
hurried toward his own camp.

"If I could go back home now, honorably and well, I would never do it,"
he muttered. "I couldn't bear to live knowing what I know now--unless I
had laughed at this death, and risked it--and dealt it!"

He was full of gladness, of exultation, in contemplation of the
wonderful gift the hours had brought him. More than any men of history
or present, he honored these soldiers the Germans feared. Like an
Indian, Dorn respected brawn, courage, fortitude, silence, aloofness.

"There was a divinity in those soldiers," he soliloquized. "I felt it in
their complete ignorance of their greatness. Yet they had pride,
jealousy. Oh, the mystery of it all!... When my day comes I'll last one
short and terrible hour. I would never make a soldier like one of them.
No American could. They are Frenchmen whose homes have been despoiled."

In the tent of his comrades that night Dorn reverted from old habit, and
with a passionate eloquence he told all he had seen and heard, and much
that he had felt. His influence on these young men, long established,
but subtle and unconscious, became in that hour a tangible fact. He