Huon talked on and on, with the eloquence of a Frenchman who relieves himself of a burden.  He told of trenches dug in a swamp, lived in and fought in, and then used for the graves of the dead, trenches that had to be lived in again months afterward.  The rotting dead were everywhere.  When they were covered the rain would come to wash away the earth, exposing them again.  That was the strange refrain of this soldier’s moody lament—­the rain that fell, the mud that forever held him rooted fast in the tracks of his despair.  He told of night and storm, of a weary squad of men, lying flat, trying to dig in under cover of rain and darkness, of the hell of cannonade over and around them.  He told of hours that blasted men’s souls, of death that was a blessing, of escape that was torture beyond the endurance of humans.  Crowning that night of horrors piled on horrors, when he had seen a dozen men buried alive in mud lifted by a monster shell, when he had seen a refuge deep underground opened and devastated by a like projectile, came a cloud-burst that flooded the trenches and the fields, drowning soldiers whose injuries and mud-laden garments impeded their movements, and rendering escape for the others an infernal labor and a hideous wretchedness, unutterable and insupportable.

Round the camp-fires the Blue Devils stood or lay, trying to rest.  But the habit of the trenches was upon them.  Dorn gazed at each and every soldier, so like in strange resemblance, so different in physical characteristics; and the sad, profound, and terrifying knowledge came to him of what they must have in their minds.  He realized that all he needed was to suffer and fight and live through some little part of the war they had endured and then some truth would burst upon him.  It was there in the restless steps, in the prone forms, in the sunken, glaring eyes.  What soldiers, what men, what giants!  Three and a half years of unnamable and indescribable fury of action and strife of thought!  Not dead, nor stolid like oxen, were these soldiers of France.  They had a simplicity that seemed appalling.  We have given all; we have stood in the way, borne the brunt, saved you—­this was flung at Dorn, not out of their thought, but from their presence.  The fact that they were there was enough.  He needed only to find these bravest of brave warriors real, alive, throbbing men.

Dorn lingered there, loath to leave.  The great lesson of his life held vague connection in some way with this squad of French privates.  But he could not pierce the veil.  This meeting came as a climax to four months of momentous meetings with the best and the riffraff of many nations.  Dorn had studied, talked, listened, and learned.  He who had as yet given nothing, fought no enemy, saved no comrade or refugee or child in all this whirlpool of battling millions, felt a profound sense of his littleness, his ignorance.  He who had imagined himself unfortunate had been blind, sick, self-centered.  Here were