n to himself. "A few rods
away are Germans!" ... Inconceivable--no reality at all! He went on with
his swift account of things, with his mind ever sharpening, with that
strange, mounting emotion flooding to the full, ready to burst its
barriers. When he and his comrades had watched their transport trains
move away--when they had stood waiting for their own trains--had the
idea of actual conflict yet dawned upon them? Dorn had to answer No. He
remembered that he had made few friends among the inhabitants of towns
and villages where he had stayed. What leisure time he got had been
given to a seeking out of sailors, soldiers, and men of all races, with
whom he found himself in remarkable contact. The ends of the world
brought together by one war! How could his memory ever hold all that had
come to him? But it did. Passion liberated it. He saw now that his eye
was a lens, his mind a sponge, his heart a gulf.

Out of the hundreds of thousands of American troops in France, what
honor it was to be in the chosen battalion to go to the front! Dorn
lived only with his squad, but he felt the envy of the whole army. What
luck! To be chosen from so many--to go out and see the game through
quickly! He began to consider that differently now. The luck might be
with the soldiers left behind. Always, underneath Dorn's perplexity and
pondering, under his intelligence and spirit at their best, had been a
something deeply personal, something of the internal of him, a selfish
instinct. It was the nature of man--self-preservation.

Like a tempest swept over Dorn the most significant ordeal and lesson of
his experience in France--that wonderful reality when he met the Blue
Devils and they took him in. However long he lived, his life must
necessarily be transformed from contact with those great men.

The night march over the unending roads, through the gloom and the
spectral starlight, with the dull rumblings of cannon shocking his
heart--that Dorn lived over, finding strangely a minutest detail of
observation and a singular veracity of feeling fixed in his memory.

Afternoon of that very day, at the reserve camp somewhere back there,
had brought an officer's address to the soldiers, a strong and emphatic
appeal as well as order--to obey, to do one's duty, to take no chances,
to be eternally vigilant, to believe that every man had advantage on his
side, even in war, if he were not a fool or a daredevil. Dorn had
absorbed the speech, remember