“Risen from the dead!” he exclaimed with warmth, clasping the young man’s hand in his own gigantic palm.  “I had despaired of ever seeing you again!  There are so many more gallant lads whom I will certainly never see!  Ah, well, such is life!  The roll of our brave young dead is long, very long!”

He reclasped his hands behind his back and walking up and down began to whistle again softly.  His emotion over the holocaust had passed, and once more he was the general planning for victory.  But he stopped presently and said to John: 

“The Strangers, to whom you belong, have come under my command.  You are one of my children now.  I have my eye on all of you.  You are brave lads.  Go and seek rest with them while you can.  You may not have another chance in a month.  We have driven the German, but he will turn, and then we may fight weeks, months, no one knows how long.  Ah, well, such is life!”

John saluted respectfully, and withdrew to the little open glade in which the Strangers were lying, sleeping a great sleep.  Captain Colton himself, wrapped in a blanket, was now a-slumber under a tree, and Wharton and Carstairs near by, stretched on their sides, were deep in slumber too.  Fires were burning on the long line, but they were not numerous, and in the distance they seemed mere pin points.  At times bars of intense white light, like flashes of lightning, would sweep along the front, showing that the searchlights of either army still provided illumination for the fighting.  The note of the artillery came like a distant and smothered groan, but it did not cease, and it would not cease, since the searchlights would show it a way all through the night.

John sat down, looked at the faint flashes on the far horizon and listened to that moaning which grew in volume as one paid close attention to it.  Europe or a great part of it had gone mad.  He was filled once more with wrath against kings and all their doings as he looked upon the murderous aftermath of feudalism, the most gigantic of all wars, made in a few hours by a few men sitting around a table.  Then he laughed at himself.  What was he!  A mere feather in a cyclone!  Certainly he had been blown about like one!

His nervous imagination now passed quickly and throwing himself upon the ground he slept like those around him.  All the Strangers were awakened at early dawn by the signal of a trumpet, and when John opened his eyes he found the air still quivering beneath the throb of the guns.  As he had foreseen they had never ceased in the darkness, and he could not remember how many days and nights now they had been raining steel upon human beings.

He was refreshed and strengthened by a night of good sleep, but his mind was as sensitive as ever.  In the morning no less bitterly than at night he raged against the folly and ambition of the kings.  But the others paid no attention to the cannon.  They were light of heart and easy of tongue.  They chaffed one another in the cool dawn, and cried to the cooks for breakfast, which was soon brought to them, hot and plentiful.