If not his own pain, the moans, the gasps, the appeals for water, the convulsive shivers from cold, and the demoniacal giggles from a soldier gone insane in medley around him would have kept the judge’s son awake.  After he had fallen, struck by he knew not what, and consciousness had returned, came the surging charge of the Browns in the counter-attack, with throaty cries and threshing tread.  He was able to turn over on his face and cover the back of his head with his hands, as a slight protection from steps that found footing on his body instead of on the earth.  After that he had understood vaguely that a newcomer on the field of the fallen needed help with a first aid, and he had found his knife and slit a sleeve and applied a bandage to check the bleeding of an artery.  Before dawn broke the sky was all alight again with a far-reaching gun-fire—­that of the Brown advance—­throwing the scene of slaughter into spectral relief, which became more real and terrible in the undramatic light of day.

Thick, ghastly thick, the dead and wounded; and the faces—­faces half buried, faces black with congealed blood, faces staring straight up at the sky, faces with eyes popping where necks had been twisted!  Near by was the distorted metal work of a dirigible, with the bodies of its crew burned beyond recognition, and farther away were other dirigible wrecks.  A wounded Gray, who had not the strength to do it himself, begged some one to lift a corpse off his body.  A Gray and a Brown were locked in a wrestling embrace in which a shrapnel burst had surprised them.  Piles of dead and wounded had been scattered and torn by a shell which found only dead and wounded for destruction at the point of its explosion.  The living were crawling out from under the shields they had made of corpses in shell craters, and searching for water in the canteens and biscuits in the haversacks of the dead.  One Gray who was completely entombed except his head remarked that he was all right if some one would dig him out.  At his side showed the legs of a man who had been buried face downward.  Ribs of the wounded broken in; features of the dead mashed by the heels of the Brown countercharge!  With every turn of his glance his surroundings grew more intimate in details of horror to the judge’s son.  On the earth, saturated with rivulets and little lakes of blood, gleamed the lead shrapnel bullets and the brighter, nickelled rifle-bullets and the barrels of rifles dropped from the hands of the fallen.

“I’d have bled to death if you hadn’t put on that bandage.  You saved my life!” whispered the man next to the judge’s son, who was Tom Fragini.

“Did I?  Did I?” exclaimed the judge’s son.  “Well, that’s something.”

“It certainly is to me,” replied Tom, holding out his hand, and thus they shook hands, this Gray and this Brown.  “Maybe some time, when the war’s over, I can thank you in more than words.”

“More than words!  Perhaps you can do that now.  You—­you haven’t a cigarette, old fellow?” asked the judge’s son.  “I haven’t smoked for three days.”