“If you don’t want to shoot, I can!  An example—­the law!  There’s no other way of dealing with him!  Give the word!” he said to Dellarme.

Stransky laughed, now in strident cynicism.  It was the laugh of the red, of bastardy, of blanketless nights in the hedgerows, and boot soles worn through to the macadam, with the dust of speeding automobiles blown in the gaunt face of hunger.  Dellarme still hesitated, recollecting Lanstron’s remark.  He pictured Stransky in a last stand in a redoubt, and every soldier was as precious to him as a piece of gold to a miser.

“One ought to be enough to kill me if you’re going to do it to slow music,” said Stransky.  “You might as well kill me as the poor fools that your poor fools are trying to—­”

Another breath finished the speech; a breath released from a ball that seemed to have come straight from hell.  The fire-control officer of a regiment of Gray artillery on the plain, scanning the landscape for the origin of the rifle-fire which was leaving many fallen in the wake of the charge of the Gray infantry, had seen two figures on the knoll.  “How kind!  Thank you!” his thought spoke faster than words.  No need of range-finding!  The range to every possible battery or infantry position around La Tir was already marked on his map.  He passed the word to his guns.

The burst of their first shrapnel-shell blinded all three actors in the scene on the crest of the knoll with its ear-splitting crack and the force of its concussion threw Stransky down beside the sergeant.  Dellarme, as his vision cleared, had just time to see Stransky jerk his hand up to his temple, where there was a red spot, before another shell burst, a little to the rear.  This was harmless, as a shrapnel’s shower of fragments and bullets carry forward from the point of explosion.  But the next burst in front of the line.  The doctor’s period of idleness was over.  One man’s rifle shot up as his spine was broken by a jagged piece of shrapnel jacket.  Now there were too many shells to watch them individually.

“It’s all right—­all right, men!” Dellarme called again, assuming his cheery smile.  “It takes a lot of shrapnel to kill anybody.  Our batteries will soon answer!”

His voice was unheard, yet its spirit was felt.  The men knew through their training that there was no use of dodging and that their best protection was an accurate fire of their own.

“Shelling us, the ——­ ——!” gasped Grandfather Fragini, who had experience, if he were weak in reading and writing.  “All noise and smoke!”—­as it was to a larger degree in his day.