He had seen now what the younger men had seen at a glance.  They were recalling Lanstron’s relief at seeing her; how he had passed them by to speak to her; the intensity of the two in their almost wordless meeting.  Her bloodless lips, the imploring passion in her eyes, her quivering impatience told the rest.

“Division headquarters!” called the operator.  “They’re getting brigade headquarters,” he added while he waited in silence.  “Brigade headquarters says the Braves have no wire.  It’s too late.  The charge is starting.”

“So it is!” cried one of the subalterns.  “Look!  Look!”

Marta looked toward the rising ground this side of the knoll in time to see bayonets flash in the waning afternoon sunlight and disappear as they descended the slope.

“There!  They’re up on the other slope without stopping!” exclaimed the general.  “Quick!  Don’t you want to see?” He offered his glasses to Marta.

“No, I can see well enough,” she murmured, though the landscape was moving before her eyes in giddy waves.

“The madness of it!  The whole slope is peppered with the fallen!”

“What a cost!  Magnificent, but not war.  Carrying their flag in the good old way, right at the front!”

“Heavens!  I hope they do it!”

“The flag’s down!”

“Another man has it—­it’s up!”

“Now—­now—­splendid!  They’re in!”

“So they are!  And the flag, too!”

“Yes, what’s left are in!”

“And Lanstron was there—­in that!”

“What if—­”

“Yes, the chief of staff, the head of the army, in an affair like that!”

“The mind of the army—­the mind that was to direct our advance!”

“When all the honors of the world are his!”

Their words were acid-tipped needles knitting back and forth through Marta’s brain.  Was Lanny one of those black specks that peppered the slope?  Was he?  Was he?

“Telephone and—­and see if Lanny is—­is killed!” she begged.

She knew not how she uttered that monstrous word killed.  But utter it she did in its naked terror.  Now she knew a simpler feeling than that of the grand sympathy of the dreamer with the horrors of war as a whole.  She knew the dumb, helpless suspense of the womenfolk remaining at home watching for the casualty lists that Westerling had suppressed.  What mattered policies of statesmen and generals, propagandas and tactics, to them?  The concern of each wife or sweetheart was with one—­one of the millions who was greater to the wife or the sweetheart than all the millions.  Marta was not thinking of sending thousands to death.  Had she sent him to death?  The agony of waiting, waiting there among these strangers, waiting for that little instrument at the end of a wire to say whether or not he were alive, became insupportable.

“I’ll go—­I’ll go out there where he is!” she said incoherently, still looking toward the knoll with glazed eyes.  She thought she was walking fast as she started for the garden gate, but really she was going slowly, stumblingly.