soldiers to whom comfort and rest were the sweetest blessings upon the earth, and they could not grasp them.  No more could they grasp them than could the gaping civilians and the distinguished travelers grasp what these grand hulks of veteran soldiers had done.  Once a group of civilians halted near the soldiers.  An officer was their escort.  He tried to hurry them on, but failed.  Delorme edged away into the gloomy, damp barn rather than meet such visitors.  Some of his comrades followed suit.  Ferier, the incomparable of the Blue Devils, the wearer of all the French medals and the bearer of twenty-five wounds received in battle—­he sneaked away, afraid and humble and sullen, to hide himself from the curious.  That action of Ferier’s was a revelation to Dorn.  He felt a sting of shame.  There were two classes of people in relation to this war—­those who went to fight and those who stayed behind.  What had Delorme or Mathie or Ferier to do with the world of selfish, comfortable, well-fed men?  Dorn heard a million voices of France crying out the bitter truth—­that if these war-bowed veterans ever returned alive to their homes it would be with hopes and hearts and faiths burned out, with hands forever lost to their old use, with bodies that the war had robbed.

Dorn bade his new-made friends adieu, and in the darkening twilight he hurried toward his own camp.

“If I could go back home now, honorably and well, I would never do it,” he muttered.  “I couldn’t bear to live knowing what I know now—­unless I had laughed at this death, and risked it—­and dealt it!”

He was full of gladness, of exultation, in contemplation of the wonderful gift the hours had brought him.  More than any men of history or present, he honored these soldiers the Germans feared.  Like an Indian, Dorn respected brawn, courage, fortitude, silence, aloofness.

“There was a divinity in those soldiers,” he soliloquized.  “I felt it in their complete ignorance of their greatness.  Yet they had pride, jealousy.  Oh, the mystery of it all!...  When my day comes I’ll last one short and terrible hour.  I would never make a soldier like one of them.  No American could.  They are Frenchmen whose homes have been despoiled.”

In the tent of his comrades that night Dorn reverted from old habit, and with a passionate eloquence he told all he had seen and heard, and much that he had felt.  His influence on these young men, long established, but subtle and unconscious, became in that hour a tangible fact.  He stirred them.  He felt them thoughtful and sad, and yet more unflinching, stronger and keener for the inevitable day.

CHAPTER XXVII

The monstrous possibility that had consumed Kurt Dorn for many months at last became an event—­he had arrived on the battle-front in France.

All afternoon the company of United States troops had marched from far back of the line, resting, as darkness came on, at a camp of reserves, and then going on.  Artillery fire had been desultory during this march; the big guns that had rolled their thunder miles and miles were now silent.  But an immense activity and a horde of soldiers back of the lines brought strange leaden oppression to Kurt Dorn’s heart.