Thus far the flight had seemed in the face of an unseen pursuer, like that of an army fleeing from some power visible to itself but not to Marta.  Now she began to observe the flashes of rifles from the crests that the rear-guards of the Grays were deserting; then the rush of the Brown skirmish line to close quarters.  Her glance pausing long on no detail, so active the landscape with its swarms and tumult, returned to the scene in front of the house.  A Gray field-battery, cutting out to one side of the road, knocking over flimsier vehicles and wounded who got in the way, careening, its drivers cursing and officers shouting, galloped out in the open field and unlimbered to support a regiment of infantry that was hastily intrenching as a point to steady the retreating masses on its front and protect them in their flight when they had passed.

Marta saw how desperately the gunners worked; she could feel their fatigue.  Nature had sunk in her heart a partisanship for the under dog.  She who had stood for the three against five, now stood for the shaken, bewildered five in the cockpit under the fire of the three.  Her sympathies went out to every beaten, weary Gray soldier.  What was the difference between a Gray and a Brown?  Weren’t they both made of flesh and bone and blood and nerves?

Under the awful spell of the panorama, she did not see Westerling, who had stopped only a few feet distant with his aide and his valet, nor did he notice her as the tumult glazed his eyes.  He was as an artist who looks on the ribbons of the canvas of his painting, or the sculptor on the fragments of his statue.  Worse still, with no faith to give him fortitude except the materialistic, he saw the altar of his god of military efficiency in ruins.  He who had not allowed the word retreat to enter his lexicon now saw a rout.  He had laughed at reserve armies in last night’s feverish defiance, at Turcas’s advocacy of a slower and surer method of attack.  In those hours of smiting at a wall with his fists and forehead, in denial of all the truth so clear to average military logic, if he had only given a few conventional directions all this disorder would have been avoided.  His army could have fallen back in orderly fashion to their own range.  The machine out of order, he had attempted no repair; he had allowed it to thrash itself to pieces.

The splinters of its debris—­steel splinters—­were lacerating his brain.  He had a sense that madness was coming and some instinct of self-preservation made the whole scene grow misty, as he tried to resolve it out of existence in the desire for some one object which was not his guns and his men in demoralization.  A bit of pink caught his eye—­the pink of a dress, a little girl’s dress, down there at the edge of the garden by the road, at the same moment that some guns of the Browns, in a new position, opened on an inviting target.  Over her head was a crack and a blue tongue of smoke whipped out of nothing; while a shower of shrapnel bullets made spurts of dust around her.  She started to run toward the terrace steps and another burst made her run in the opposite direction, while she looked about in a paralysis of fear and then threw herself on her face.