Whereupon the Frenchman spoke rapidly to the comrade nearest him, so rapidly that all Kurt could make of what he said was that here was an American soldier with a new idea.  They drew closer, and it became manifest that the interesting idea was Kurt’s news about the American army.  It was news here, and carefully pondered by these Frenchmen, as slowly one by one they questioned him.  They doubted, but Dorn convinced them.  They seemed to like his talk and his looks.  Dorn’s quick faculties grasped the simplicity of these soldiers.  After three terrible years of unprecedented warfare, during which they had performed the impossible, they did not want a fresh army to come along and steal their glory by administering a final blow to a tottering enemy.  Gazing into those strange, seared faces, beginning to see behind the iron mask, Dorn learned the one thing a soldier lives, fights, and dies for—­glory.

Kurt Dorn was soon made welcome.  He was made to exhaust his knowledge of French.  He was studied by eyes that had gleamed in the face of death.  His hand was wrung by hands that had dealt death.  How terribly he felt that!  And presently, when his excitement and emotion had subsided to the extent that he could really see what he looked at, then came the reward of reality, with all its incalculable meaning expressed to him in the gleaming bayonets, in the worn accoutrements, in the greatcoats like clapboards of mud, in the hands that were claws, in the feet that hobbled, in the strange, wonderful significance of bodily presence, standing there as proof of valor, of man’s limitless endurance.  In the faces, ah! there Dorn read the history that made him shudder and lifted him beyond himself.  For there in those still, dark faces, of boys grown old in three years, shone the terror of war and the spirit that had resisted it.

Dorn, in his intensity, in the over-emotion of his self-centered passion, so terribly driven to prove to himself something vague yet all-powerful, illusive yet imperious, divined what these Blue Devil soldiers had been through.  His mind was more than telepathic.  Almost it seemed that souls were bared to him.  These soldiers, quiet, intent, made up a grim group of men.  They seemed slow, thoughtful, plodding, wrapped and steeped in calm.  But Dorn penetrated all this, and established the relation between it and the nameless and dreadful significance of their weapons and medals and uniforms and stripes, and the magnificent vitality that was now all but spent.

Dorn might have resembled a curious, adventure-loving boy, to judge from his handling of rifles and the way he slipped a strong hand along the gleaming bayonet-blades.  But he was more than the curious youth:  he had begun to grasp a strange, intangible something for which he had no name.  Something that must be attainable for him!  Something that, for an hour or a moment, would make him a fighter not to be slighted by these supermen!