The traffic of the main roads spread into branch roads which ended in the ganglia of supply depots, all kept in touch by the network of wires focussing through different headquarters to Westerling.  In this conquered territory with its face of desolation there were no fighting men except reserves or convalescents on their way to the front.  All the rest were wounded or dead or occupied in the routine of supply and intelligence.  The organization which had been drilled through two generations of peace for this emergency exhibited the signs of pressure.

Eyes that met when commands were given and received were dull from want of sleep or hectically bright as a hypochondriac’s.  Voices spoke in a grim, tired monotone, broken by sudden flashes of irritation or eruptions of anger.  Features were drawn like those of rowers against a tide.  The very proportions of the ghastly harvest after the last, the heaviest of all, of the attacks brought spasms of nausea to men already hardened to blood and death.  If the officers of the staffs in their official conspiracy of silence would not talk, the privates and the wounded would.  The judge’s son, observing, listening, thinking, was gathering a story to tell his comrades of Company B of the 128th.

That night he and his comrade convalescents slept in the open.  Their bodies were huddled close together under their blankets for warmth, while aching limbs twitched from the fatigue of the march.  The morning showed that others had coughs which should have kept them from the front.

“Four or five cases of pneumonia due in that lot!” a doctor remarked to a hospital-corps sergeant.  “Put them in empties right away.”

After this announcement other coughs developed.  Amusing, these sudden, purposeful efforts should one happen to think of them in that way.  But no one did.

“No you don’t, you malingerers!” said the doctor sharply.  “I’ve been at this business long enough to know a real cough.”

Now the judge’s son and a dozen others were separated from the rest of their companions and started over a hill.  From the top they had a broad view.  Across a strip of valley lay the main rise to the heights of the range.  Along the summit nothing warlike was visible except the irregular landscape against the horizon.  There the enemy rested in his fortifications.  The slopes, as far as the judge’s son could see on either hand, were like the warrens of an overpopulated rabbit world in hiding.  Here was the army of the Grays in its redoubts and trenches A thousand times as many men as were ever at work on the Panama Canal had been digging their way forward—­digging regardless of union hours; digging to save their own lives and to take lives.  And the nearer they came to the top of the range the deeper they had to dig and the slower their progress.

As the little group of convalescents descended into a valley a bursting shell from the Browns scattered its fragments over the earth near by.