John again searched the horizon eagerly with his glasses, but it showed only green hills and bits of wood, bare of human activity.  The French aeroplanes still hovered, but not in front of General Vaugirard.  They were off to right and left, where the wings of the nations had closed in combat.  He was ceasing to think of the foes as armies, but as nations in battle line.  Here stood not a French army, but France, and there stood not a German army, but Germany.

As he looked toward the left he picked out a narrow road, running between hedges, and showing but a strip of white even through the glasses.  He saw something coming along this road.  It was far away when he first noticed it, but it was coming with great speed, and he was soon able to tell that it was a man on a motor cycle.  His pulse leaped again.  He felt instinctively that the rider was for them and that he bore something of great import.  The figure, man and cycle, molded into one, sped along the narrow road which led to the base of the hill on which General Vaugirard and his staff stood.

The huge general saw the approaching figure too, and he began to whistle melodiously like the note of a piccolo, with the vast thunder of the guns accompanying him as an orchestra.  John knew that the cyclist was a messenger, and that he was eagerly expected.  An order of some kind was at hand!  All the members of the staff had the same conviction.

The cyclist stopped at the bottom of the hill, leaped from the machine and ran to General Vaugirard, to whom he handed a note.  The general read it, expelled his breath in a mighty gust, and turning to his staff, said: 

“My children, our time has come.  The whole central army of which we are a part will advance.  It will perhaps be known before night whether France is to remain a great nation or become the vassal of Germany.  My children, if France ever had need for you to fight with all your hearts and souls, that need is here today.”

His manner was simple and majestic, and his words touched the mind and feeling of every one who heard them.  John was moved as much as if he had been a Frenchman too.  He felt a profound sympathy for this devoted France, which had suffered so much, to which his own country still owed that great debt, and which had a right to her own soil, fertilized with so many centuries of labor.

General Vaugirard, resting a pad on his knee, wrote rapid notes which he gave to the members of his staff in turn to be delivered.  John’s was to a Parisian regiment lying in a field, and expanding body and mind into instant action, he leaped upon the cycle and sped away.  It was often hard for him now to separate fact from fancy.  His imagination, vivid at all times, painted new pictures while such a tremendous drama passed before him.

Yet he knew afterward that the sound of the battle did increase in volume as he flew over the short distance to the regiment.  Both east and west were shaking with the tremendous concussion.  One crash he heard distinctly above the others and he believed it was that of a forty-two centimeter.