“Take him home to mother!” groaned Pilzer.

“That will do for you, Hugo Mallin!” came another interruption, a sharp one from Captain Fracasse, who had returned unobserved from the rear in time to overhear Hugo’s remarks.  “And that’s the way to talk, Aronson and Pilzer.  As for you, Mallin, I’ve a mind to put you under arrest and send you back for a coward!  A coward—­do you hear?”

“Ah-h!” breathed Pilzer in a guttural of satisfaction.

Hugo crimsoned at first in confusion, then he looked frankly and unflinchingly at the captain.

“Very well, sir!” he said with a certain dignity which Fracasse, who was a good deal of a martinet, found very irritating.

“No, that would suit you too well!” Fracasse declared.  “You shall stay!  You shall do the duty for which your country trained you and take your share of the chances.”

“Yes, sir!” answered Hugo.  “But won’t you,” he asked persuasively and with the wondering inquiry of the suggestion that had sprung into his heretic brain, “won’t you ask the men if there are not some here who really, in their hearts, the logic of their hearts—­which is often better than brain logic—­do not believe just as I do?”

“Have you gone insane?  There are none!” In the impulse of anger that swept his cheeks with a red wave Fracasse half drew his sword as if he would strike Hugo.  “And, Mallin, you are a marked man.  I shall watch you!  I’ll have the lieutenants and sergeants watch you.  At the first sign of flunking I’ll make an example of you!”

“Yes, sir,” answered Hugo, with the automatic deference of private to officer but with a reserved and studious inquiry that made the captain bite his lip.

“I’ll have Aronson and Pilzer watch you, too!” Fracasse added.

“Yes, sir!” said Pilzer promptly.

Then, under the restraint of the captain’s presence, there was a silence that endured.  The men were left to the sole resource of their thoughts and observation of their surroundings.  They were lying in a pasture facing the line of white posts whose tops ran in an even row over level ground.  On the other side of the boundary was a wheat-field.  Here a farmer had commenced his fall ploughing.  His plough was in the furrow where he had left it when he unhitched his team for the day, before an orderly had come to tell him that he must move out of his house overnight.  The wheat stubble swept on up to a knoll in the distance.

All the landscape in front of Fracasse’s company seemed to have been deserted; no moving figures were anywhere in sight; no sign of the enemy’s infantry.  No trains came or went along the lines of steel into the mountain tunnel, which had been mined at a dozen points by the Browns.  No vehicles and no foot-passengers dotted the highway into the town.  Over the mountains and over the plain, planes and dirigibles moved in wide circles restively, watching for a signal as hawks watch for prey.  Suspense this—­suspense of such a swift vibration that it was like a taut G string of a violin under the bow!