called up Lenore's image. It hung
there in the blackness, a dim, pale phantom of her sweet face, her
beautiful eyes, her sad lips, and then it vanished. Not at all could he
call up a vision of his beloved wheat-fields. So the suspicion that
something was wrong with his mind became a certainty. It angered him,
quickened his sensitiveness, even while he despaired. He ground his
teeth and clenched his fists and swore to realize his presence there,
and to rise to the occasion as had been his vaunted ambition.

Suddenly he felt something slimy and hairy against his wrist--then a
stinging bite. A rat! A trench rat that lived on flesh! He flung his arm
violently and beat upon the soft earth. The incident of surprise and
disgust helped Dorn at least in one way. His mind had been set upon a
strange and supreme condition of his being there, of an emotion about to
overcome him. The bite of a rat, drawing blood, made a literal fact of
his being a soldier, in a dugout at the front waiting in the blackness
for his call to go on guard. This incident proved to Dorn his
limitations, and that he was too terribly concerned with his feelings
ever to last long as a soldier. But he could not help himself. His
pulse, his heart, his brain, all seemed to beat, beat, beat with a
nameless passion.

Was he losing his nerve--was he afraid? His denial did not reassure him.
He understood that patriotism and passion were emotions, and that the
realities of a soldier's life were not.

Dorn forced himself to think of realities, hoping thus to get a grasp
upon his vanishing courage. And memory helped him. Not so many days,
weeks, months back he had been a different man. At Bordeaux, when his
squad first set foot upon French soil! That was a splendid reality. How
he had thrilled at the welcome of the French sailors!

Then he thought of the strenuous round of army duties, of training
tasks, of traveling in cold box-cars, of endless marches, of camps and
villages, of drills and billets. Never to be forgotten was that morning,
now seemingly long ago, when an officer had ordered the battalion to
pack. "We are going to the front!" he announced. Magic words! What
excitement, what whooping, what bragging and joy among the boys, what
hurry and bustle and remarkable efficiency! That had been a reality of
actual experience, but the meaning of it, the terrible significance, had
been beyond the mind of any American.

"I'm here--at the front--now," whispered Dor