A flash from Fracasse’s pocket lamp showed faces pasty white and eyes of staring glassiness.  Fracasse’s face and the colonel’s were also white—­white with the rigidity of carved marble, carved with a set frown of determination.  Fracasse was going in with his company and the colonel with his regiment.  It was their duty.  Both realized the nature of the risk; and, worse, each knew that the men realized it.  In another age, when education was not so common and unthinking, unforeseeing passion could be aroused in ignorant minds, a stimulant on an empty stomach might have made them animals, oblivious to danger.  They were about to offer their lives to pave the way for others to reach the works that none of them, probably, would ever reach.  For the like of this, in gathering the enemy’s spears to his breast, a saga had risen around one national hero.  But Fracasse’s veterans were only the shivering units of the millions; the part of the machine that happened to be the first to strike another machine in collision.  Such was the end of all the training, the marching, the drilling in the gallant business of arms, with no more romance or glory than beeves going to the slaughter.

“You’ll be the first out into the glacis, the first into the enemy’s redoubt,” said the colonel, forcing a tone of good, old-fashioned “up-guards-and-at-’em” vigor, as he touched the bronze cross on Peterkin’s breast with his forefinger.

Little Peterkin, always pale but not so pale now as his comrades, flushed at the distinction.

“Yes, sir!” and he saluted.

In his eyes was the exaltation of his simple-minded faith.  He did not think too much.  What more could kings and conquerors ask than such a soldier as the valet’s son, secure in the belief that his charmed life would bring him through the assault unharmed?

“My God!  I can’t!” exclaimed the banker’s son.  “I’ve suffered enough.  There’s life and wealth and all that it gives waiting for me at home!  I’m young—­I can’t!”

There was a rustle of bodies in a restless movement of drawn breaths at common thought taking form, desperately fraught with alarm to Fracasse.

“You will!” Fracasse said, thrusting his revolver muzzle against the ribs of the banker’s son.  “If you don’t, I’ll shoot you dead, or you’ll be trampled to death by the rush from the rear!”

The wedge point may not strike back at the hammer that drives it.  Close packed behind Fracasse’s company was a seemingly limitless mass of soldiery, palpitant with their short breaths, a steamy, sickening odor rising from their water-soaked clothes.  Here were men so wet, so tired, so nerve-worn that they did not care when death came; men who wanted to curse and strike out against their fate; men who wanted to turn in flight, their natural impulse held down by the bonds of discipline and that pride of fellowship which is shamed to confess to a shiver along the spine.  Some saw pictures of home, of sweethearts; some saw nothing.  Some were in a coma of merciless suspense that grew more and more unendurable, until it seemed that anything to break it would be welcome.