Of such stuff were the Braves as Caesar’s veterans who walloped the Belgae, the adventurous ruffians of Cortez, the swashbucklers who fought in Flanders, the followers of Bonnie Prince Charlie, and the regulars of the American Indian campaigns.  When they rose to the charge with a yell, in a wave of scarlet and blue, flashing with brass buttons, their silken flag rippling in the front rank, they made a picture to please the romantic taste.  Here on the brown background of the commonplace three millions of moderns was a patch of the color and glamour that story-tellers, poets, artists, and moving-picture men would choose as the theme of real military glory.

Intoxication of all the senses, of muscles and nerves, with the mesmerism of movement and burning desire which calls the imagination of youth to arms!  The supreme moment of fury and splendid rush, which becomes the recollection to the survivor to be told from the knee to future generations in a way to make small boys love to play with soldiers!  These men knew nothing except that they had legs and that ahead was a goal.  Oaths and laughter were mingled in their souls; the energy of a delirium sped their steps.  They were so many human missiles fired by an impulse, with too much initial velocity to stop at the bottom of the valley as the colonel had directed.  Lord, no!  Let’s have the thing over with, bit in teeth!  The common instinct of the living, who neither saw nor thought of those who fell, swept them up the slope.  Every man who survived was the whole regiment in himself; its pride, its gallantry, its inheritance in his keeping.

“Fiends of hell and angels of heaven!  We’re here and we did it alone!” gasped the winded, ragged line that reached the crest.

“I thought they would!” said the brigade commander, who had watched the charge through his glasses from an eminence.  “But at what a cost!  It was lucky for them that it was only a rear-guard resistance.  However, it certainly thrills the imagination and it will be a good thing for Brown prestige in Africa.”

“Why?” Marta heard the officers around her asking after their exclamations of amazement at the news that Lanstron was going in the charge.  “Why should the chief of staff risk his life in this fashion?”

Marta knew.  All her taunts about sending others to death from his office chair, uttered as the fugitive sarcasm of a mood, recurred in the merciless hammer-beat of recollection.  For a moment she was aghast, speechless.  Then the officers, occupied with the startling news, heard a voice, wrenched from a dry throat in anguish, saying: 

“The telephone!  Try to reach him!  Tell him he must not!”

“We can hardly say ‘must not’ to a chief of staff,” said the general automatically.

“Tell him I ask him not to!  Try to reach him—­try—­you can try!”

“Yes, yes!  Certainly!” exclaimed the general, turning to the telephone operator.