“Good!” observed the colonel as if he had a sweet taste in his mouth.

“And if you find it too stiff,” the brigade commander went on, “why, I’ve seasoned veterans back of you who will press in to your support.”

“Veterans, you say, and seasoned?  I have some of my own, too!  Thank you!  Thank you most kindly!” said the colonel, saluting stiffly, with a twist to the corner of his mouth.  “When we need their help it will be to bury our dead,” he added.  “Can we do it alone?  Will we?”

He passed these inquiries along the line, which rose to the suggestion with different kinds of oaths and jests and grins and grim whistles.  The scholar suddenly transferred his affections from the Greeks’ phalanx to the Roman legions and began with the first verse of Virgil’s “AEneid.”  He always made the change when action was near.  “The Greeks for poetry and the Romans for war!” he declared, and could argue his company to sleep if anybody disputed him.

“I want to be in one fight.  I haven’t been under fire in the whole war,” Lanstron explained to the colonel, who understood precisely the feeling.

“Lanstron is with us!  The chief of staff is watching us!” ran the whisper from flank to flank of the Braves.  It was not wonderful to them that he should be there.  This complicated business of running a war over a telephone was not in the ken of their calculations.  The colonel was with them, so all the generals ought to be.  “We’ll show Lanstron!” determined the Braves.  “We’ll show him how we fight in Africa!”

“With the first rush you go to the bottom of the valley; with the second, take the knoll!” Such were the colonel’s simple tactics.  “But stop on the top of the knoll.  Though we’d like to take the capital this afternoon, it’s against orders.”

Lanstron, dropping into place in the line, felt as if he were about to renew his youth.  He had the elation of his early aeroplane flights, when he was likely to be hung on a church steeple.  Now he was not sending men to death; he was having his personal fling.  It was all very simple beside sitting at a desk with battle raging in the distance.  He dodged at the first bullet that whistled near his head and looked rather sheepishly at the man next him, who was grinning.

“Lots of fellows do that with the first one, no matter how many times they’ve been under fire,” said the comrade.  “But if they do it with the second one—­” He dropped the corners of his mouth with a significance that required no further comment to express his views on that kind of a soldier.

“I shan’t!” said Lanstron; and he kept his word.

“I knew by the cut of your jib you wouldn’t!” observed the Brave, speaking not to the chief of staff but to the man.  What were chiefs of staff to him?  Everybody on the firing-line was simply another Brave.

Lanstron liked the compliment.  It pleased him better than those endowing him with military genius.  It was free of rank and etiquette and selfishness.