Was he losing his nerve—­was he afraid?  His denial did not reassure him.  He understood that patriotism and passion were emotions, and that the realities of a soldier’s life were not.

Dorn forced himself to think of realities, hoping thus to get a grasp upon his vanishing courage.  And memory helped him.  Not so many days, weeks, months back he had been a different man.  At Bordeaux, when his squad first set foot upon French soil!  That was a splendid reality.  How he had thrilled at the welcome of the French sailors!

Then he thought of the strenuous round of army duties, of training tasks, of traveling in cold box-cars, of endless marches, of camps and villages, of drills and billets.  Never to be forgotten was that morning, now seemingly long ago, when an officer had ordered the battalion to pack.  “We are going to the front!” he announced.  Magic words!  What excitement, what whooping, what bragging and joy among the boys, what hurry and bustle and remarkable efficiency!  That had been a reality of actual experience, but the meaning of it, the terrible significance, had been beyond the mind of any American.

“I’m here—­at the front—­now,” whispered Dorn to himself.  “A few rods away are Germans!” ...  Inconceivable—­no reality at all!  He went on with his swift account of things, with his mind ever sharpening, with that strange, mounting emotion flooding to the full, ready to burst its barriers.  When he and his comrades had watched their transport trains move away—­when they had stood waiting for their own trains—­had the idea of actual conflict yet dawned upon them?  Dorn had to answer No.  He remembered that he had made few friends among the inhabitants of towns and villages where he had stayed.  What leisure time he got had been given to a seeking out of sailors, soldiers, and men of all races, with whom he found himself in remarkable contact.  The ends of the world brought together by one war!  How could his memory ever hold all that had come to him?  But it did.  Passion liberated it.  He saw now that his eye was a lens, his mind a sponge, his heart a gulf.

Out of the hundreds of thousands of American troops in France, what honor it was to be in the chosen battalion to go to the front!  Dorn lived only with his squad, but he felt the envy of the whole army.  What luck!  To be chosen from so many—­to go out and see the game through quickly!  He began to consider that differently now.  The luck might be with the soldiers left behind.  Always, underneath Dorn’s perplexity and pondering, under his intelligence and spirit at their best, had been a something deeply personal, something of the internal of him, a selfish instinct.  It was the nature of man—­self-preservation.

Like a tempest swept over Dorn the most significant ordeal and lesson of his experience in France—­that wonderful reality when he met the Blue Devils and they took him in.  However long he lived, his life must necessarily be transformed from contact with those great men.