“We shall win again today,” said Fleury, rousing him from his absorption.  “Look across the fields, Scott, my friend, and see how those great masses of infantry charging our army have been repulsed.”

It was a far look, and at the distance the German brigades seemed to be blended together, but the great gray mass was coming back slowly.  He forgot all about himself and his own fate in his desire to see every act of the gigantic drama as it passed before him.  He took no thought of escape at present, nor did Fleury, who stood beside him.  The fire of the guns great and small had now blended into the usual steady thunder, beneath which human voices could be heard.

“We don’t have the forty-two centimeters, nor the great siege guns,” said Fleury, “but the French field artillery is the best in the world.  It’s undoubtedly holding back the German hosts and covering the French advance.”

“That’s my opinion, too,” said John.  “I saw its wonderful work in the retreat toward Paris.  I think it saved the early French armies from destruction.”

The German army was made of stern material.  Having planted its feet here it refused to be driven back.  Its cannon was a line of flaming volcanoes, its cavalry charged again and again into the face of death, and its infantry perished in masses, but the stern old general spared nothing.  Passing up and down the lines, listening at the telephone and receiving the reports of air scouts and land scouts, he always hurled in fresh troops at the critical points and Fritz and Karl and Wilhelm and August, sober and honest men, went forward willingly, sometimes singing and sometimes in silence, to die for a false and outworn system.  John as a prisoner had a better view than he would have had if with the French army.  In a country open now he could see a full mile to right and left, where the German hosts marched again and again to attack, and while the French troops were too far away for his eyes he beheld the continuous flare of their fire, like a broad red ribbon across the whole western horizon.

The passing of time was nothing to him.  He forgot all about it in his absorption.  But the sun climbed on, afternoon came, and still the battle at this point raged, the French unable to drive the Germans farther and the Germans unable to stop the French attacks.  John roused himself and endeavored to dissociate the thunder on their flanks from that in front, and, after long listening, he was able to make the separation, or at least he thought so.  He knew now that the struggle there was no less fierce than the one before him.

The Kaiser himself must be present with one or the other of these armies, and a man who had talked for more than twenty years of his divine right, his shining armor, his invincible sword and his mailed fist must be raging with the bitterness of death to find that he was only a mortal like other mortals, and that simple French republicans were defeating the War Lord, his Grand Army and the host of kings, princes, dukes, barons, high-born, very high-born, and all the other relics of medievalism.  Dipped to the heel and beyond in the fountain of democracy, John could not keep from feeling a fierce joy as he saw with his own eyes the Germans fighting in the utmost desperation, not to take Paris and destroy France, but to save themselves from destruction.