in either direction.  Who had laid it?  Not the Grays.  Why was it there?  He called for one of his men to bring a buzzer, and it was the work of little more than a minute to cut the wire and make an attachment.  Then he heard a woman’s voice talking to “Lanny.”  Who was Lanny?  He waited till he had heard enough to know that it was none other than Lanstron, the chief of staff of the Browns, and the woman must be a spy.  An orderly despatched to the chief of intelligence with the news returned with the order: 

“Drop everything and report to me in person at once.”

“For this I have made my sacrifice!” Marta thought.  “The killing goes on by Lanny’s orders, not by Westerling’s, this time.”

Leaving her mother to enjoy the prospect, a slow-moving figure, trance-like, she went along the first terrace path to a point near the veranda where the whole sweep of landscape with its panorama of retreat magnetized her senses.  Like the gray of lava, the Gray soldiery was erupting from the range; in columns, still under the control of officers, keeping to the defiles; in swarms and batches, under the control of nothing but their own emotions.  Mostly they were hugging cover, from instinct if not from direction, but some relied on straight lines of flight and speed of foot for escape.  Coursing aeroplanes were playing a new part.  Their wireless was informing the Brown gunners where the masses were thickest.  This way and that the Brown artillery fire drove retreating bodies, prodding them in the back with the fearful shepherdry of their shells.  Officers’ swords flashed in the faces of the bolters or in holding rear-guards to their work.  Officers and orderlies were galloping hither and thither with messages, in want of wires.  Commanders had been told to hold, but how and where to hold?  They saw neighboring regiments and brigades going and they had to go.  The machine, the complicated modern war machine, was broken; the machine, with its nerves of intelligence cut, became a thing of disconnected parts, each part working out its own salvation.  Authority ceased to be that of the bureau and army lists.  It was that of units racked by hardship, acting on the hour’s demand.

Gorged was the pass road, overflowing with the struggling tumult of men and vehicles.  Self-preservation breaking the bonds of discipline was in the ascendant, and it sought the highway, even as water keeps to the river bed.  Like specks on the laboring tide was the white of bandages.  An ambulance trying to cut out to one side was overturned.  The frantic chauffeur and hospital-corps orderly were working to extricate the wounded from their painful position.  A gun was overturned against the ambulance.  A melee of horses and men was forming at the foot of the garden gate in front of the narrowing bounds of the road into the town, as a stream banks up before a jam of driftwood.  The struggle for right of way became increasingly wild; the dam of men, horses, and wagons grew.  A Brown dirigible was descending toward the great target; but on closer view its commander forbore, the humane impulse outweighing the desire for retribution for colleagues in camp and mess who had gone down in a holocaust in the aerial battles of the night.