The last slow travel of his squad over dark, barren space and through deep, narrow, winding lanes in the ground had been a nightmare ending to the long journey.  France had not yet become clear to him; he was a stranger in a strange land; in spite of his tremendous interest and excitement, all seemed abstract matters of his feeling, the plague of himself made actuality the substance of dreams.  That last day, the cumulation of months of training and travel, had been one in which he had observed, heard, talked and felt in a nervous and fevered excitement.  But now he imagined he could not remember any of it.  His poignant experience with the Blue Devils had been a reality he could never forget, but now this blackness of subterranean cavern, this damp, sickening odor of earth, this presence of men, the strange, muffled sounds—­all these were unreal.  How had he come here?  His mind labored with a burden strangely like that on his chest.  A different, utterly unfamiliar emotion seemed rising over him.  Maybe that was because he was very tired and very sleepy.  Sometime that night he must go on duty.  He ought to sleep.  It was impossible.  He could not close his eyes.  An effort to attend to what he was actually doing disclosed the fact that he was listening with all his strength.  For what?  He could not answer then.  He heard the distant, muffled sounds, and low voices nearer, and thuds and footfalls.  His comrades were near him; he heard their breathing; he felt their presence.  They were strained and intense; like him, they were locked up in their own prison of emotions.

Always heretofore, on nights that he lay sleepless, Dorn had thought of the two things dearest on earth to him—­Lenore Anderson and the golden wheat-hills of his home.  This night he called up Lenore’s image.  It hung there in the blackness, a dim, pale phantom of her sweet face, her beautiful eyes, her sad lips, and then it vanished.  Not at all could he call up a vision of his beloved wheat-fields.  So the suspicion that something was wrong with his mind became a certainty.  It angered him, quickened his sensitiveness, even while he despaired.  He ground his teeth and clenched his fists and swore to realize his presence there, and to rise to the occasion as had been his vaunted ambition.

Suddenly he felt something slimy and hairy against his wrist—­then a stinging bite.  A rat!  A trench rat that lived on flesh!  He flung his arm violently and beat upon the soft earth.  The incident of surprise and disgust helped Dorn at least in one way.  His mind had been set upon a strange and supreme condition of his being there, of an emotion about to overcome him.  The bite of a rat, drawing blood, made a literal fact of his being a soldier, in a dugout at the front waiting in the blackness for his call to go on guard.  This incident proved to Dorn his limitations, and that he was too terribly concerned with his feelings ever to last long as a soldier.  But he could not help himself.  His pulse, his heart, his brain, all seemed to beat, beat, beat with a nameless passion.