A newcomer, who took the place of a man who had died on the cot next to the judge’s son, had been in the fight.  He was still ether-sick and weak from the amputation of his right arm, with a dazed, glassy, and far-away look in his eyes, as if everything in the world was strange and uncertain.

“The fearful flashes—­the explosions—­the gusts of steel in the air!” he whispered.

The next night Westerling followed up his supposed advantage at Engadir as he had planned, and there was no sleep for the thunders and the light of the explosions through the barracks-room windows.

“I can see what is happening and feel—­and feel!” said the man who had been at Engadir.

In the morning the bulletin announced that more positions were taken, with very heavy losses—­to the enemy.  But the news that travelled unofficially from tongue to tongue down the castle road and spoke in the faces of doctors and nurses said, “And to us!” plainly enough, even if the judge’s son had not heard a doctor remark: 

“It’s awful—­inconceivable!  Not a hospital tent in this division is unoccupied.  Most of the houses in town are full, and we’re preparing for another grand attack!”

Now for two days the guns kept up their roar.

“Making ready for the infantry to go in,” ran the talk around the barracks yard.

After the infantry had gone in and the result was known, the doctor on his morning round said to the judge’s son: 

“You’re pretty pale yet, but you’ll do.  We must make room for a big crowd that is coming and the orders are to get every man who is in any condition to fight to the front.”

“And if I get another hole in me you’ll patch me up again?”

“Get any number and we’ll patch you up if they’re in the right place,” was the answer.  “But be careful about that detail.”

Soon the judge’s son was with a score of convalescents who were marched down to the town, where they formed in column with other detachments.

“Not with that cough!” exclaimed a doctor as they were about to start, ordering a man out of line.  “You’d never get to the front.  You’d only have to be brought back in an ambulance.”

An enlightening march this for the judge’s son from hospital to trenches, moving with a tide of loaded commissariat wagons and empty ambulances and passing a tide of loaded ambulances and empty commissariat wagons.  A like scene was on every road to the front; a like scene on every vista of landscape along any part of the frontier.  All trees and bushes and walls and buildings that would give cover to the enemy the Browns had razed.  On every point of rising ground were the trenches and redoubts that the Browns had yielded after their purpose of making the Grays earn their way by trenches of their own had been served.  The fields were trampled by the feet of infantry, cut by gun wheels, ploughed by shells, and sown with the conical nickel pellets from rifles and the round lead bullets of shrapnel.  An escarpment of rock, where the road-bed was slashed into a hillside in a sharp turn, struck by the concentrated fire of automatics, appeared to have been beaten by thousands of sharp-headed hammers, leaving a pile of chips and dust.