eparation of a deed
that had taken one second! That transformed him! His life on earth, his
spirit in the beyond, could never be now what they might have been. And
he sobbed through grinding teeth as he felt the disintegrating,
agonizing, irremediable forces at work on body, mind, and soul.

He had blown out the brains of his first German.

Fires of hell, in two long lines, bordering a barren, ghastly, hazy
strip of land, burst forth from the earth. From holes where men hid
poured thunder of guns and stream of smoke and screeching of iron. That
worthless strip of land, barring deadly foes, shook as with repeated
earthquakes. Huge spouts of black and yellow earth lifted,
fountain-like, to the dull, heavy bursts of shells. Pound and jar,
whistle and whine, long, broken rumble, and the rattling concatenation
of quick shots like metallic cries, exploding hail-storm of iron in the
air, a desert over which thousands of puffs of smoke shot up and swelled
and drifted, the sliding crash far away, the sibilant hiss swift
overhead. Boom! Weeeee--eeeeooooo! from the east. Boom!
Weeeee--eeeeooooo! from the west.

At sunset there was no let-up. The night was all the more hideous. Along
the horizon flashed up the hot sheets of lightning that were not of a
summer storm. Angry, lurid, red, these upflung blazes and flames
illumined the murky sky, showing in the fitful and flickering intervals
wagons driving toward the front, and patrols of soldiers running toward
some point, and great upheavals of earth spread high.

This heavy cannonading died away in the middle of the night until an
hour before dawn, when it began again with redoubled fury and lasted
until daybreak.

Dawn came reluctantly, Dorn thought. He was glad. It meant a charge.
Another night of that hellish shrieking and bursting of shells would
kill his mind, if not his body. He stood on guard at a fighting-post.
Corporal Owens lay at his feet, wounded slightly. He would not retire.
As the cannons ceased he went to sleep. Rogers stood close on one side,
Dixon on the other. The squad had lived through that awful night.
Soldiers were bringing food and drink to them. All appeared grimly gay.

Dorn was not gay. But he knew this was the day he would laugh in the
teeth of death. A slumbrous, slow heat burned deep in him, like a
covered fire, fierce and hot at heart, awaiting the wind. Watching
there, he did not voluntarily move a muscle, yet all his body twitched
like that of