At that instant, like bitter fate, shot up a rocket, or a star-flare of calcium light, bursting to expose all underneath in pitiless radiance.  With a gasp that was a sob, Dorn shrank flat against the wall, staring into the fading circle, feeling a creep of paralysis.  He must be seen.  He expected the sharp, biting series of a machine-gun or the bursting of a bomb.  But nothing happened, except that the flare died away.  It had come from behind his own lines.  Control of his muscles had almost returned when a heavy boom came from the German side.  Miles away, perhaps, but close!  That boom meant a great shell speeding on its hideous mission.  It would pass over him.  He listened.  The wind came from that side.  It was cold; it smelled of burned powder; it carried sounds he was beginning to appreciate—­shots, rumbles, spats, and thuds, whistles of varying degree, all isolated sounds.  Then he caught a strange, low moaning.  It rose.  It was coming fast.  It became an o-o-o-O-O-O!  Nearer and nearer!  It took on a singing whistle.  It was passing—­no—­falling!...  A mighty blow was delivered to the earth—­a jar—­a splitting shock to windy darkness; a wave of heavy air was flung afar—­and then came the soft, heavy thumping of falling earth.

That shell had exploded close to the place where Dorn stood.  It terrified him.  It reduced him to a palpitating, stricken wretch, utterly unable to cope with the terror.  It was not what he had expected.  What were words, anyhow?  By words alone he had understood this shell thing.  Death was only a word, too.  But to be blown to atoms!  It came every moment to some poor devil; it might come to him.  But that was not fighting.  Somewhere off in the blackness a huge iron monster belched this hell out upon defenseless men.  Revolting and inconceivable truth!

It was Dorn’s ordeal that his mentality robbed this hour of novelty and of adventure, that while his natural, physical fear incited panic and nausea and a horrible, convulsive internal retching, his highly organized, exquisitely sensitive mind, more like a woman’s in its capacity for emotion, must suffer through imagining the infinite agonies that he might really escape.  Every shell then must blow him to bits; every agony of every soldier must be his.

But he knew what his duty was, and as soon as he could move he began to edge along the short beat.  Once at the end he drew a deep and shuddering breath, and, fighting all his involuntary instincts, he peered over the top.  An invisible thing whipped close over his head.  It did not whistle; it cut.  Out in front of him was only thick, pale gloom, with spectral forms, leading away to the horizon, where flares, like sheet-lightning of a summer night’s storm, ran along showing smoke and bold, ragged outlines.  Then he went to the other end to peer over there.  His eyes were keen, and through long years of habit at home, going about at night without light, he could see distinctly where ordinary sight would meet only a blank wall.  The flat ground immediately before him was bare of living or moving objects.  That was his duty as sentinel here—­to make sure of no surprise patrol from the enemy lines.  It helped Dorn to realize that he could accomplish this duty even though he was in a torment.