When their feet at last actually stood on the knoll which had dealt death to their ranks and they saw the brown figures of the enemy that had driven them back in full flight, the men of the 128th felt the thrill of triumph won in the face of bullets.  This is a thrill by itself, primitive and masculine, that calls the imagination of men to war for war’s sake.  Pilzer, the butcher’s son, wanted to kill for the sheer joy and revenge of killing.  He rejoiced in the dead and the blood spots that, as clearly as the trench itself, marked the line that Dellarme’s men had occupied along the crest of the knoll.  It pleased him to use one of the bodies as a rest for his rifle, while he laid his sight in ecstasy on the large target of two men of the last section who were bringing off one of the wounded, and he swore when they got away.

“But there’s another out there all alone!” he cried.  “Better say your prayers, for I’m going to get you,” he whispered; though, as we know, Stransky was not hit.

Peterkin had been doing his best to make amends for past errors by present enthusiasm of application.  He fired no less earnestly than the butcher’s son.  Now that Eugene Aronson was dead, Pilzer had become Peterkin’s chief patron and guide.  He would be doing right if he did what that brave Pilzer did, he was thinking, while he was conscious of Fracasse’s eyes boring into his back.  With the others, but no more expeditiously, however frightened, he fell back to cover from the burst of shell fire; and then, with the word to break ranks, he found himself the centre of a group including not only his captain but the colonel of the regiment.  He could not quite make out the expressions on their faces, but he surmised that they were wondering how any man born under the flag of the Grays could be such a coward as he was.  Probably he would be shot at sunrise.

“How did it happen?” Fracasse asked.

His tone was very pleasant, but Peterkin felt that this was only the calmness of a judge hearing the evidence of a culprit.  Punishment would be, accordingly, the more drastic.  He was too scared to tell the truth.  He spoke softly, with the mealy tongue of a valet father who never explained why the wine was low in the decanter by any reference to a weakness of his own palate.

“I didn’t hear the whistle to fall back,” he said, “so I stayed.”

“Didn’t hear the whistle!” exclaimed the captain.  He looked at the colonel and the colonel looked at him.  The colonel stroked his mustache as if it were a nice mustache.  “There wasn’t any whistle,” said Fracasse with a wry grin.

“Yes, my boy; and then?” asked the colonel, who had never before called any private in his regiment “my boy.”

A bright light broke on Peterkin.  Inherited instinct did not permit him to show much emotion on his face, and he had, too, an inherited gift of invention.  He rubbed his rifle stock with his palm and bowed much in the fashion of the parent washing his hands in gratitude for a compliment.