The spectacle before Dorn’s hard, keen eyes was one that he thought wonderful.  Far across No Man’s Land, which sloped somewhat at that point in the plain, he saw movement of troops and guns.  His eyes were telescopic.  Over there the ground appeared grassy in places, with green ridges rising, and patches of brush and straggling trees standing out clearly.  Faint, gray-colored squads of soldiers passed in sight with helmets flashing in the sun; guns were being hauled forward; mounted horsemen dashed here and there, vanishing and reappearing; and all through that wide area of color and action shot up live black spouts of earth crowned in white smoke that hung in the air after the earth fell back.  They were beautiful, these shell-bursts.  Round balls of white smoke magically appeared in the air, to spread and drift; long, yellow columns or streaks rose here, and there leaped up a fan-shaped, dirty cloud, savage and sinister; sometimes several shells burst close together, dashing the upflung sheets of earth together and blending their smoke; at intervals a huge, creamy-yellow explosion, like a geyser, rose aloft to spread and mushroom, then to detach itself from the heavier body it had upheaved, and float away, white and graceful, on the wind.

Sinister beauty!  Dorn soon lost sight of that.  There came a gnawing at his vitals.  The far scene of action could not hold his gaze.  That dark, uneven, hummocky break in the earth, which was a goodly number of rods distant, yet now seemed close, drew a startling attention.  Dorn felt his eyes widen and pop.  Spots and dots, shiny, illusive, bobbed along that break, behind the mounds, beyond the farther banks.  A yell as from one lusty throat ran along the line of which Dorn’s squad held the center.  Dorn’s sight had a piercing intensity.  All was hard under his grip—­his rifle, the boards and bags against which he leaned.  Corporal Owens rose beside him, bareheaded, to call low and fiercely to his men.

The gray dots and shiny spots leaped up magically and appallingly into men.  German soldiers!  Boches!  Huns on a charge!  They were many, but wide apart.  They charged, running low.

Machine-gun rattle, rifle-fire, and strangled shouts blended along the line.  From the charging Huns seemed to come a sound that was neither battle-cry nor yell nor chant, yet all of them together.  The gray advancing line thinned at points opposite the machine-guns, but it was coming fast.

Dorn cursed his hard, fumbling hands, which seemed so eager and fierce that they stiffened.  They burned, too, from their grip on the hot rifle.  Shot after shot he fired, missing.  He could not hit a field full of Huns.  He dropped shells, fumbled with them at the breech, loaded wildly, aimed at random, pulled convulsively.  His brain was on fire.  He had no anger, no fear, only a great and futile eagerness.  Yell and crack filled his ears.  The gray, stolid, unalterable Huns must be driven back.  Dorn loaded, crushed his rifle