“You were in the big attack night before last?” asked the judge’s son.

“We started in,” said Peterkin, “but Captain Fracasse brought us back,” he added in a way that implied that only orders had kept him from going on.

Peterkin, the trembling little Peterkin of the baptismal charge across the line of white posts, had been the first out of the redoubt on to the glacis in that abortive effort, living up to the bronze cross on his breast.  He was one of the half dozen out of the score that had started to return alive.  The psychology of war had transformed his gallantry; it had passed from simulation to reality, thanks to his established conviction that he led a charmed life.  Little Peterkin, always pale but never getting paler, was ready to lead any forlorn hope.  A superstitious nature, which, at the outset of the war, had convinced him that he must be killed in the first charge, now, as the result of his survival, gave him all the faith of Eugene Aronson that the bullet would never be made that could kill him.

“Was the attack general all along the front?” some one asked.  “We couldn’t tell.  All we knew was the hell around us.”

“Yes,” answered the judge’s son.

“Did we accomplish anything?”

“A few minor positions, I believe.”

“But we will win!” said Peterkin.  “The colonel said so.”

“And the news—­what is the news?” demanded the barber’s son.  “You needn’t be afraid,” he added.  “The officers are on the other side of the redoubt.  They get sick of the sight of us and we of them and this is their recess and ours from the eternal digging.”

“Yes, the news from home!”

“Yes, from home!  We don’t even get letters any more.  They’ve shut off all the mails.”

“I met a man from our town,” said the judge’s son.  “He said that after that story was published in the press about Hugo’s damning patriotism and hurrahing for the Browns—­it was fearfully exaggerated—­his old father and mother shut themselves up in the house and would not show their faces for shame.  But his sweetheart, however much her parents stormed, refused to renounce him.  She held her head high and said that the more they abused him the more she loved him, and she knew he could do nothing wrong.”

“Hugo was not a patriot.  It takes red blood to make a patriot!” said Peterkin.  In the pride of heroism and prestige, he was becoming an oracular enunciator of commonplaces from the lips of his superiors.

“The absence of any word from the front only increases the suspense of the people.  They do not know whether their sons and brothers and husbands are living or dead,” continued the judge’s son.

“Up to a week ago they let us write,” said Pilzer, “though they wouldn’t let us say anything except that we were well.”

“That was because it might give information to the enemy,” said Peterkin.

“As if I didn’t know that!” grumbled Pilzer.  “The enemy seems to be always ready for us, anyway,” he added.