“And no nerves!”

“No nerves, did you say?  There you are wrong.  Did you see that hand twitching in his pocket?  Of course, you’ve heard about the hand?  Why, he’s a bundle of nerve-wires held in control; a man of the age; master of his own machine, therefore, able to master the machine of an army.”

Of course, they guessed nothing of Marta’s part in his success.  The very things they were saying about him built up a figure of the type whose character she had keenly resented a few minutes before.

“But, Miss Galland, you seem to know him far better than we.  This is not news to you,” remarked the brigade commander.

“Yes, I saw the accident of his first flight when his hand was injured,” she said, and winced with horror.  Never had the picture of him as he rose from the wreck appeared so distinct.  She could see every detail of his looks; feel his twinges of pain while he smiled.  Was the revelation the more vivid because it had not once occurred to her since the war began?  It shut out the presence of the officers; she no longer heard what they were saying.  Black fear was enveloping her.  Vaguely she understood that they were looking away at something.  She heard the roar of artillery not far distant and followed their gaze toward the knoll where Dellarme’s men had received their baptism of fire, now under a canopy of shrapnel smoke.

“That’s about their last stand in the tangent, their last snarl on our soil,” remarked the brigade commander.

“And we’re raining shells on it!” said his aide.  “With our glasses we’ll be able to watch the infantry go in.”

“Yes, very well.”

“We’re all used to how it feels, now we’ll see how it looks at a distance,” piped one of the soldiers.

Not until he had shouted to them did they notice a division staff-officer who had come up from the road.  He had a piece of astounding news to impart before he mentioned official business.

“What do you think of this?” he cried.  “Nothing could stop him!  Lanstron—­yes, Lanstron has gone into that charge with the African Braves!”

In these days, when units of a vast army in the same uniform, drilled in the same way, had become interchangeable parts of a machine, the African Braves still kept regimental fame.  They had guarded the stretches of hot sand in one of the desert African colonies of the Browns; and they had served in the jungle in the region of Bodlapoo, which, by the way, was nominally the cause of the war.  They had fought Mohammedan fanatics and black savages.  It did not matter much to them when they died; now as well as ever.  If they had mothers or sisters they were the secrets of each man’s heart.  The scapegrace youth, the stranded man of thirty who would forget his past, the born adventurer, the renegade come a cropper, the gentleman who had gambled, the remittance man whose remittance had stopped, the peasant’s son who had run away from home, criminals and dreamers, some