Dorn felt the blanching of his face, the tingling of his nerves, the tightening of his muscles.  A cold and terrible meaning laid hold of him even in the instant when he trembled before this flaming-eyed French veteran who complimented him while he instructed.  How easily, Dorn thought, could this soldier slip the bright bayonet over his guard and pierce him from breast to back!  How horrible the proximity of that sinister blade, with its glint, its turn, its edge, so potently expressive of its history!  Even as Dorn crossed bayonets with this inspired Frenchman he heard a soldier comrade say that Delorme had let daylight through fourteen boches in that memorable victory of the Marne.

“You are very big and strong and quick, monsieur,” said the officer Huon, simply.  “In bayonet-work you will be a killer of boches.”

In their talk and practice and help, in their intent to encourage the young American soldier, these Blue Devils one and all dealt in frank and inevitable terms of death.  That was their meaning in life.  It was immeasurably horrible for Dorn, because it seemed a realization of his imagined visions.  He felt like a child among old savages of a war tribe.  Yet he was fascinated by this close-up suggestion of man to man in battle, of German to American, of materialist to idealist, and beyond all control was the bursting surge of his blood.  The exercises he had gone through, the trick he had acquired, somehow had strange power to liberate his emotion.

The officer Huon spoke English, and upon his words Dorn hung spellbound.

“You Americans have the fine dash, the nerve.  You will perform wonders.  But you don’t realize what this war is.  You will perish of sheer curiosity to see or eagerness to fight.  But these are the least of the horrors of this war.

“Actual fighting is to me a relief, a forgetfulness, an excitement, and is so with many of my comrades.  We have survived wounds, starvation, shell-shock, poison gas and fire, the diseases of war, the awful toil of the trenches.  And each and every one of us who has served long bears in his mind the particular horror that haunts him.  I have known veterans to go mad at the screaming of shells.  I have seen good soldiers stand upon a trench, inviting the fire that would end suspense.  For a man who hopes to escape alive this war is indeed the ninth circle of hell.

“My own particular horrors are mud, water, and cold.  I have lived in dark, cold mud-holes so long that my mind concerning them is not right.  I know it the moment I come out to rest.  Rest!  Do you know that we cannot rest?  The comfort of this dirty old barn, of these fires, of this bare ground is so great that we cannot rest, we cannot sleep, we cannot do anything.  When I think of the past winter I do not remember injury and agony for myself, or the maimed and mangled bodies of my comrades.  I remember only the horrible cold, the endless ages of waiting, the hopeless misery of the dugouts, foul, black rat-holes that we had to crawl into through sticky mud and filthy water.  Mud, water, and cold, with the stench of the dead clogging your nostrils!  That to me is war!... Les Miserables! You Americans will never know that, thank God.  For it could not be endured by men who did not belong to this soil.  After all, the filthy water is half blood and the mud is part of the dead of our people.”