Marta remained where Westerling had left her, rooted to the ground by the monstrous spell of the developing panorama of seemingly limitless movement.  With each passing minute there must be a hundred acts of heroism which, if isolated in the glare of a day’s news, would make the public thrill.  At the outset of the war she had seen the Browns, as part of a preconceived plan, in cohesive rear-guard resistance, with every detail of personal bravery a utilized factor of organized purpose.  Now she saw defence, inchoate and fragmentary, each part acting for itself, all deeds of personal bravery lost in a swirl of disorganization.  That was the pity of it, the helplessness of engineers and of levers when the machine was broken; the warning of it to those who undertake war lightly.

The Browns’ rifle flashes kept on steadily weaving their way down the slopes, their reserves pressing close on the heels of the skirmishers in greedy swarms.  A heavy column of Brown infantry was swinging in toward the myriad-legged, writhing gray caterpillar on the pass road and many field-batteries were trotting along a parallel road.  Their plan developed suddenly when a swath of gun-fire was laid across the pass road at the mouth of the defile, as much as to say:  “Here we make a gate of death!” At the same time the head of the Brown infantry column flashed its bayonets over the crest of a hill toward the point where the shells were bursting.  These men minded not the desperate, scattered rifle-fire into their ranks.  Before their eyes was the prize of a panic that grew with their approach.  Kinks were out of legs stiffened by long watches.  The hot breath of pursuit was in their nostrils, the fever of victory in their blood.

In the defile, the impulse of one Gray straggler, who shook a handkerchief aloft in fatalistic submission to the inevitable, became the impulse of all.  Soon a thousand white signals of surrender were blossoming.  As the firing abruptly ceased, Marta heard the faint roar of the mighty huzzas of the hunters over the size of their bag.

In the area visible to Marta was the strife of forces larger than the largest that Napoleon ever led in battle; as large as fought the decisive battle in the last war of the Grays.  But here was only a section of the raging whole from frontier end to frontier end.  The immensity of it!  All the young manhood of a nation employed!  Marta ceased to see any particular incident of the scene.  All was confused in a red mist—­red as blood.  She, the one being in that landscape who was a detached observer, felt herself condemned to watch the war go on forever.

An edge of the curtain of mist lifted.  Sight and mind and soul concentrated on the nearest horror.  She saw the whirlpool at the foot of the garden, horses and men in a straggle among dead and wounded, which had grown fiercer now that the portion of the retreat that had not been cut off in the defile pressed forward the more madly.  She had thought of herself as ashes; as an immovable creature of flayed nerves, incapable of raising her hand to change the march of events.  But the misery that she saw intimately, almost within stone’s throw of her door, broke the spell with its appeal.  The hectic energy of battle speeded her steps in the blessed oblivion of action.