This story fetched a roar from every soldier present except Dorn.  An absence of mirth in him had been noted before.

“Dorn, can’t you laugh!” protested Dixon.

“Sure I can—­when I hear something funny,” replied Dorn.

His comrades gazed hopelessly at him.

“My Lawd! boy, thet was shore funny,” drawled Brewer with his lazy Southern manner.

“Kurt, you’re not human,” said Owens, sadly.  “That’s why they call you Demon Dorn.”

All the boys in the squad had nicknames.  In Dorn’s case several had been applied by irrepressible comrades before one stuck.  The first one received a poor reception from Kurt.  The second happened to be a great blunder for the soldier who invented it.  He was not in Dorn’s squad, but he knew Dorn pretty well, and in a moment of deviltry he had coined for Dorn the name “Kaiser Dorn.”  Dorn’s reaction to this appellation was discomfiting and painful for the soldier.  As he lay flat on the ground, where Dorn had knocked him, he had struggled with a natural rage, quickly to overcome it.  He showed the right kind of spirit.  He got up.  “Dorn, I apologize.  I was only in fun.  But some fun is about as funny as death.”  On the way out he suggested a more felicitous name—­Demon Dorn.  Somehow the boys took to that.  It fitted many of Dorn’s violent actions in training, especially the way he made a bayonet charge.  Dorn objected strenuously.  But the name stuck.  No comrade or soldier ever again made a hint of Dorn’s German name or blood.

“Fellows, if a funny story can’t make Dorn laugh, he’s absolutely a dead one,” said Owens.

“Spring a new one, quick,” spoke up some one.  “Gee! it’s great to laugh....  Why, I’ve not heard from home for a month!”

“Dorn, will you beat it so I can spring this one?” queried Owens.

“Sure,” replied Dorn, amiably, as he started away.  “I suppose you think me one of these I-dare-you-to-make-me-laugh sort of chaps.”

“Forget her, Dorn—­come out of it!” chirped up Rogers.

To Dorn’s regret, he believed that he failed his comrades in one way, and he was always trying to make up for it.  Part of the training of a soldier was the ever-present need and duty of cheerfulness.  Every member of the squad had his secret, his own personal memory, his inner consciousness that he strove to keep hidden.  Long ago Dorn had divined that this or that comrade was looking toward the bright side, or pretending there was one.  They all played their parts.  Like men they faced this incomprehensible duty, this tremendous separation, this dark and looming future, as if it was only hard work that must be done in good spirit.  But Dorn, despite all his will, was mostly silent, aloof, brooding, locked up in his eternal strife of mind and soul.  He could not help it.  Notwithstanding all he saw and divined of the sacrifice and pain of his comrades, he knew that his ordeal was infinitely harder.  It was natural that they hoped for the best.  He had no hope.