Whatever his youth or his impelling spirit of manhood, the fact was that he inspired many of these veterans of the bloody years to Homeric narratives of the siege of Verdun, of the retreat toward Paris, of the victory of the Marne, and lastly of the Kaiser’s battle, this last and most awful offensive of the resourceful and frightful foe.

Brunelle told how he was the last survivor of a squad at Verdun who had been ordered to hold a breach made in a front stone wall along the out posts.  How they had faced a bombardment of heavy guns—­a whistling, shrieking, thundering roar, pierced by the higher explosion of a bursting shell—­smoke and sulphur and gas—­the crumbling of walls and downward fling of shrapnel.  How the lives of soldiers were as lives of gnats hurled by wind and burned by flame.  Death had a manifold and horrible diversity.  A soldier’s head, with ghastly face and conscious eyes, momentarily poised in the air while the body rode away invisibly with an exploding shell!  He told of men blown up, shot through and riddled and brained and disemboweled, while their comrades, grim and unalterable, standing in a stream of blood, lived through the rain of shells, the smashing of walls, lived to fight like madmen the detachment following the bombardment, and to kill them every one.

Mathie told of the great retreat—­how men who had fought for days, who were unbeaten and unafraid, had obeyed an order they hated and could not understand, and had marched day and night, day and night, eating as they toiled on, sleeping while they marched, on and on, bloody-footed, desperate, and terrible, filled with burning thirst and the agony of ceaseless motion, on with dragging legs and laboring breasts and red-hazed eyes, on and onward, unquenchable, with the spirit of France.

Sergeant Delorme spoke of the sudden fierce about-face at the Marne, of the irresistible onslaught of men whose homes had been invaded, whose children had been murdered, whose women had been enslaved, of a ruthless fighting, swift and deadly, and lastly of a bayonet charge by his own division, running down upon superior numbers, engaging them in hand-to-hand conflict, malignant and fatal, routing them over a field of blood and death.

“Monsieur Dorn, do you know the French use of a bayonet?” asked Delorme.

“No,” replied Dorn.

“Allons! I will show you,” he said, taking up two rifles and handing one to Dorn.  “Come.  It is so—­and so—­a trick.  The boches can’t face cold steel....  Ah, monsieur, you have the supple wrists of a juggler!  You have the arms of a giant!  You have the eyes of a duelist!  You will be one grand spitter of German pigs!”