This cut through even Hugo’s philosophy and the blood went in a hot rush to his cheeks; but he slipped on his pack, as the others were doing, and readjusted his cartridge-box.  Word was passed to make ready for another rush, and soon the men knew that yesterday was not part of the hideous nightmare which had kept their legs quivering mechanically, as in the charge, while they slept, but that the nightmare was a continuing reality and the peace of morning a dream.

Under cover of the rain of shell fire on Dellarme’s position, already described, they mounted the wall of the second terrace and ran to the wall of the first terrace.  They had expected to suffer terribly, but passed safely underneath a sheet of bullets that caught other sections of their regiment on the lower terraces.  Over their heads were the muzzles of the Browns’ rifles, blazing toward the road, while in the direction of the tower they saw the first charge of another regiment melting like snow under sprays of flame.  They could not fire at Dellarme’s men and Dellarme’s men could not fire at them without leaning over the parapet.  They could not go ahead.  There was no room to their rear, for the reserves behind the third terrace had rushed up to the second terrace; those behind the fourth to the third; and still others across the road to the fourth, in successive waves.

With a welter of slaughter around them, Fracasse’s men were in something of the position that little Peterkin had enjoyed in the shell crater.  They ate a breakfast of biscuits, washed down by water from their canteens.  Trickles of sand from bullet holes sprinkled their shoulders and they had enough resiliency of spirit to grin when a stream of sand from a bag torn by a shell burst ran down the back of Pilzer’s neck.  It was rather amusing to hear Jake growling as he twisted in his blouse.

Hugo caught the humor of it in another sense, for the same shell burst threw a piece of brown sleeve matted in a piece of flesh among the flowers.  The next instant he saw a squad of Grays who sprang up to rush toward the linden stumps go down under the hose stream from the automatic with the precision of having been struck by an electric current.  Not occupied, as he had been yesterday, with the business of keeping to his part as a physical cog in the machine, he was seeing war as a spectator—­as Marta saw it, as only a privileged few ever see it.  Society, he was thinking, took the trouble to bring boys through the whooping-cough and measles, pay for clothing and doctors’ bills, and, while it complained about business losses and safe-guarded trees and harvests and buildings, destroyed the most valuable product of all with a spatter of bullets from a rapid-firer.

The position of him and his comrades struck him as tragically ludicrous.  Were they grown men?  Had they reasoning minds?  Were they of the great races that had given the world steam-power, electric power, anaesthesia, and antiseptics?  Had they the religion of Christ?  Had they an inheritance of great ages of art, literature, music, and philosophy?  Did they guard the treasures of their libraries and galleries?  Would they shudder in indignation if some one sent a bullet through the Sistine Madonna, or throw a bomb at the Venus de Milo, or struck a rare Chinese porcelain into fragments with an axe?