“It is marvelous to have looked down upon a battle a hundred miles long,” he said.  “Have you any idea where these Uhlans intend to take us?”

“I haven’t.  Doubtless they don’t know themselves.  The night is here now, and I imagine they’ll stop somewhere soon.”

The twilight died in the west as well as the east, and darkness came over the field of gigantic strife.  But the earth continued to quiver with the thunder of artillery, and John felt the waves of air pulsing in his ears.  Now and then searchlights burned in a white blaze across the hills.  Fields, trees and houses would stand out for a moment, and then be gone absolutely.

John’s vivid imagination turned the whole into a storm at night.  The artillery was the thunder and the flare of the searchlights was the lightning.  His mind created, for a little while, the illusion that the combat had passed out of the hands of man and that nature was at work.  He and Fleury ceased to talk and he walked on, thinking little of his destination.  He had no sense of weariness, nor of any physical need at all.

Von Arnheim rode up by his side and said: 

“You’ll not have to walk much further, Mr. Scott.  A camp of ours is just beyond a brook, not more than a few hundred yards away, and the prisoners will stay there for the night.  I’m sorry to find you among the French fighting against us.  We Germans expected American sympathy.  There is so much German blood in the United States.”

“But, as I told Captain von Boehlen, we’re a republic, and we’re democrats.  In many of the big ideas there’s a gulf between us and Germany so wide that it can never be bridged.  This war has made clear the enormous difference.”

Von Arnheim sighed.

“And yet, as a people, we like each other personally,” he said.

“That’s so, but as nations we diverge absolutely.”

“Perhaps, I can’t dispute it.  But here is our camp.  You’ll be treated well.  We Germans are not barbarians, as our enemies allege.”

John saw fires burning in an ancient wood, through which a clear brook ran.  The ground was carpeted with bodies, which at first he thought were those of dead men.  But they were merely sleepers.  German troops in thousands had dropped in their tracks.  It was scarcely sleep, but something deeper, a stupor of exhaustion so utter, both mental and physical, that it was like the effect of anesthesia.  They lay in every imaginable position, and they stretched away through the forest in scores of thousands.

John and Fleury saw their own place at once.  Several hundred men in French uniforms were lying or sitting on the ground in a great group near the forest.  A few slept, but the others, as well as John could see by the light of the fires, were wide awake.

The sight of the brook gave John a burning thirst, and making a sign to the German guard, who nodded, he knelt and drank.  He did not care whether the water was pure or not, most likely it was not, with armies treading their way across it, but as it cut through the dust and grime of his mouth and throat he felt as if a new and more vigorous life were flowing into his veins.  After drinking once, twice, and thrice, he sat down on the bank with Fleury, but in a minute or two young von Arnheim came for him.