CHAPTER XXVI

Through the pale obscurity of a French night, cool, raw, moist, with a hint of spring in its freshness, a line of soldiers plodded along the lonely, melancholy lanes.  Wan starlight showed in the rifts between the clouds.  Neither dark nor light, the midnight hour had its unreality in this line of marching men; and its reality in the dim, vague hedges, its spectral posts, its barren fields.

Rain had ceased to fall, but a fine, cold, penetrating mist filled the air.  The ground was muddy in places, slippery in others; and here and there it held pools of water ankle-deep.  The stride of the marching men appeared short and dragging, without swing or rhythm.  It was weary, yet full of the latent power of youth, of unused vitality.  Stern, clean-cut, youthful faces were set northward, unchanging in the shadowy, pale gleams of the night.  These faces lifted intensely whenever a strange, muffled, deep-toned roar rolled out of the murky north.  The night looked stormy, but that rumble was not thunder.  Fifty miles northward, beyond that black and mysterious horizon, great guns were booming war.

Sometimes, as the breeze failed, the night was silent except for the slow, sloppy tramp of the marching soldiers.  Then the low voices were hushed.  When the wind freshened again it brought at intervals those deep, significant detonations which, as the hours passed, seemed to grow heavier and more thunderous.

At length a faint gray light appeared along the eastern sky, and gradually grew stronger.  The dawn of another day was close at hand.  It broke as if reluctantly, cold and gray and sunless.

The detachment of United States troops halted for camp outside of the French village of A——.

Kurt Dorn was at mess with his squad.

The months in France had flown away on wings of training and absorbing and waiting.  Dorn had changed incalculably.  But all he realized of it was that he weighed one hundred and ninety pounds and that he seemed to have lived a hundred swift lives.  All that he saw and felt became part of him.  His comrades had been won to him as friends by virtue of his ever-ready helping hand, by his devotion to training, by his close-lipped acceptance of all the toils and knocks and pains common to the making of a soldier.  The squad lived together as one large family of brothers.  Dorn’s comrades had at first tormented him with his German name; they had made fun of his abstraction and his letter-writing; they had misunderstood his aloofness.  But the ridicule died away, and now, in the presaged nature of events, his comrades, all governed by the physical life of the soldier, took him for a man.