Barrow's unit had suffered sorely, but its gaps were filled from other sources and fresh supplies received from home. Close upon the middle of August it moved to take the field. This delay had not been without advantages, perhaps the chief of which was a fluency in French that many of his men were able to acquire. It had also given Jeb an opportunity to acquire an entirely new viewpoint regarding the purposes of this war, which had not penetrated to Hillsdale.

As the train now proceeded slowly, switching here and there to let other strings of cars pass toward the front with more important freight, Jeb felt that he was at last nearing the great adventure. His experience with the submarine left an indelible effect without producing anything like the result Tim would have desired. For Jeb had been involuntarily projected into that crisis before being given time to think; he had gone with the stream, not buoyed by courage but spurred by despair. Once tossed into the hideous vortex, he simply had to get out—which was vastly different from deliberately going into it with eyes ahead, as now when he approached the battle front! Nevertheless, the torture he faced upon the floating box, although unknown to him, left an impress for the good.

As he sat uncomfortably drawn up on the seat of a third-class compartment he missed Tim, and wondered dully if the regiment, which that little son of Mars had said was waiting for him—at attention!—could now be in the thick of things. He pictured Tim chasing Germans with the same dogged nerve that he had chased and caught the murderer of the little nurse. As evening fell, battle scenes grew vivid in the twilit compartment, because he was thinking again! Whenever speeding trains passed, their approaching rumbles would make him start, and leave him sick in spirit; for each time he would at first mistake them for the growling of distant guns, and he dreaded the hour when these sounds would reach him. He despised the thought of guns, despised the military trains, despised the war, the blood and maiming;—he despised himself. He needed Tim!

"Is there anything on your mind, old fellow?" one of the unit asked him kindly.

"Oh, no," he forced himself to laugh. "Have a cigarette, won't you?"

Early next morning, after an almost sleepless night, the unit disembarked at a village standing as a solitary outpost on the edge of a great unknown wilderness. Beyond this point the railroad, even civilization, had been paralyzed by the dragon that fed upon humanity. If Jeb expected the villagers to be out in force to greet Barrow's unit, he was disappointed; for, with the exception of a crippled man laboriously pushing a cart, a nun who with bowed head came from one doorway and hurried into another, and a bent old woman struggling to take down the night shutters from her shop window, the place might have been deserted. On the far side of his train, however, where he had not looked, a group of soldiers lounged about their wagons waiting to take these passengers of mercy forward; unshaven chaps they were, well meriting the nickname of poilus—"the hairy ones."

Now that the train had stopped he could hear the far-off growling of guns; deep-voiced monsters which his imagination pictured straining on their leashes while snarling at each other across the space of miles—truly dogs of war! He drew farther back in the seat, dreading to get out; but the moment had come, the fellows and nurses were moving to the door, the great task was at hand! He tried, while standing, to simulate indifference, but his legs were weak and his teeth chattered, just a little, in spite of his effort to control himself. It seemed as if he were forever wanting to yawn, conscious of the heaviness upon his chest.

With Dr. Barrow and a lieutenant on the first creaking wagon, the others followed, but there was no road. A morass was there, that formerly had been a road—a ditch sloshy with mud which, in some places, made it necessary for all hands to climb down and put their shoulders to the wheels.

"It is trying, this traveling in limbers," the lieutenant smiled apologetically. "The incessant hauling up of shells from our bases destroys the best of roads in a few days. But what would you?" he shrugged, smiling again. "If the ammunition dumps are constantly depleted, they must be fed!"

The far-off French artillery, in skillfully emplaced positions to right and left, seeming to enfilade on a point immediately ahead, was so vigorously directed that the German guns must have been dazed, since their counter-battery work sounded spasmodic and—so far as distance permitted Jeb to guess—never effective. Yet he was moving toward that tumult; as inexorably as death, he approached it. With eyes feeding upon this new world and ears startled by fierce rumblings, he felt as though he were living in a nightmare; and when the next minute threatened to snap his reason or strangle his frantically pounding heart, he turned to the driver, asking—but fearful of the answer:

"Who's winning this battle?"

It was spoken only in Hillsdale French, aided by a two months stop in Paris; but his poilu companion smiled brightly and replied in the average Paris English:

"Oh, Monsieur, there is now for three days what you call moment decalme. Tomorrow, if no rain, oui!—perhaps a ver' fine battle!"

Then this was a lull!—this cannonading, that to Jeb seemed reaching from skyline to skyline, was only a lull! Merciful God, he cried in his soul, what might a battle be like!

By midday, after hours of frightful tugging, they were halfway on their journey, being well out on what two weeks ago was the battle field, but now presenting a picture of broadcast desolation. Shell craters, caused by heavier projectiles burrowing and bursting, pockmarked the ground like a telescopic photograph of the moon. Fields, so lately rich with waving grain, were blasted into subsidences and cavities, bisected by crumbled trenches before which the wreckage of barbed-wire entanglements—a fortnight since forming barriers so impregnable as to resemble from a distance walls of red rust—lay snarled and tied into a million knots by the ruthless lyddite fingers.

It was a pastoral landscape distorted by the paralysis of suffering and death, and Jeb realized that not for many years would these tortured fields regain their tranquillity. Where were rises, now lay depressions; the loamy top soil was blown into dust and scattered to the winds, while sterile clay and pebbly strata had been boiled up from below to take its place. Mixed with this mass of unprofitable earth, strewn over its surface and buried for a depth of thirty feet, were thousands of tons of other wire, iron stakes, and wire stanchions; cartridge cases, rifles, and gas gongs; sand bags, iron scraps, and forge tools; steel helmets, spades, and telephones; pieces of uniforms, water pipes, pick axes, gas masks, binoculars, trench periscopes, blankets, surgical dressings, boots, aye, and human bones—all, all things which the plow shares of coming generations would be turning up to remind man (should man ever forget) that Humanity had once been outraged by a people who, although made in the imitation of Christ, preferred to assume the habits of beasts.

"How, in the name of God," Jeb cried, "could any army stand before such a blasting as must have been here!"

"Our army did, Monsieur," the driver said quietly. "It not only stood, but drove the Boche far back."

"Well, I take off my hat to your army!"

"The world does, also, Monsieur," his companion replied; although it was modestly spoken, without a hint of boastfulness. "We do not fight like the Boche, Monsieur," he added simply. "Their methods are more like a mob with a bad conscience; they fight more with a dread of being defeated than with the honesty of soldiers who have an honest cause."

He then explained to Jeb that these fields, after all, represented merely the face to face struggle of man and man, and were therefore less sickening than the devastation they would see farther on, which stood as a monument to the enemy's vilest cupidity. This became apparent when they began to cross that stretch of country gloatingly described by German newspapers as "the empire of death"—meaning a territory seven or eight miles in width, extending over the entire front, which by order of "the High German Command" was converted absolutely into waste. Forced by the Allies to retreat, this "High German Command" conceived that, by leaving a barrier of desolation and cruelty so terrible, no army would be hardy enough, or have heart enough, to advance across it. Their system was complete, as the results now showed—although their calculations had gone wrong.

"First, Monsieur," he said, "they began by robbing the American Relief Committee's supplies, immediately following their solemn pledge to permit this food to succor the starving peasantry; therefore those pitiable folk, already tragic human wrecks, continued to starve. Next they killed these peasants' cows to fill their own precious bellies, and then the little babies began, by slow starvation, to die. But the men, women, and boys old enough to till the soil, or work in German factories, were fed and sent away; the girls pretty enough to wait upon German officers—you know what that means, Monsieur—were dressed in stolen finery and, weeping, driven to their new positions—six hundred of them taken from within the space that you are looking on now, although we have learned that many succeeded in killing themselves. Only the helpless aged and the babes escaped these brutalities; for they, being useless, were left to the mercy of the vultures, unless salvaged by our army. Right on this ground we saved many such, Monsieur; Mon Dieu! but how our army did weep over them!"

Jeb had already seen enough to bring this recital well within the focus of truth, and as the wagons wound slowly forward he further saw to what depth of hatred and cold malice the mind of that "High Command" descended. Burned villages and hamlets might have been expected, as conflagrations spring from bursting shells, yet even his inexperienced eye detected a very sharp distinction between ruins wrought by military operations and the vandalism caused by unbridled, bestial passions. For nowhere upon this barren outlook had a house been left standing—all was a mass of tumbled brick and stone and clay and twisted timbers, licked by flames or crumbled by explosions scientifically placed by German engineers; nay, nor was there even a barn, nor an agricultural implement with which some palsied peasant woman might in time reclaim her land. Iron of plows, of harrows, of cultivators, lay in piles amidst the ashes of their frames; spokes of wagon and cart wheels had been hacked to splinters, and harness cut into useless bits. Wells had been fouled by chucking in their own dead, or stable refuse. In the orchards every tree stood girdled, the immature fruit wrinkled amidst withered leaves. Never again, unless French nurserymen sped here hastily to bridge from bark to bark, or graft onto the old stumps,—as they had elsewhere attempted with varying promise—would these slopes of arboriculture put forth buds; neither would the poplars, planes, mulberries, willows—all had been granted citizenship to this newly created German Empire, "the empire of death."

"Where are those whom you did not salvage—I mean the girls? Are they still in the German lines?" Jeb asked.

"Not if they have found a way to die," his comrade answered in a whisper. "The Belshazzar feast of those Prussian swine, Monsieur, is the Calvary of every maid who does not find a swifter way to God—but the debauched officers know that, and keep them closely guarded. Oh," he cried, "our hearts give thanks that your country is coming to help us avenge these things! All along we have said that if the American spirit of decency and fairness—so well known and loved by us—could but see even the little which you have seen, your armies would be pouring to our aid!—just as your wonderful nurses have come!"

Jeb felt a rush of self-righteous anger that for the moment transcended his horror of going forward. While in Paris he had read official translations from the German press; now with his own eyes he was looking upon the things gloatingly described in the Berliner Tageblatt[1] when it told the people of Berlin: "The enemy's mouth must stay dry, his eyes turn in vain to the wells—they are buried in rubble. No four walls for him to settle down into; all levelled and burnt out, the villages turned into dumps of rubbish, churches and church towers laid out in ruins. Smouldering fires and smoke and stench; a rumble spreading from village to village—the mine charges still doing their final work, which leaves nothing more to do."

It was a cry of false triumph that must have stirred the German soul to joy, because the very next day, he now remembered, the Lokalanzeiger[2] had boastfully added: "No village or farm was left standing, no road was left passable, no railroad track or embankment, nothing, nothing whatever, not a tub, not a bench for those who will succeed them in the abandoned places. What they could not take with them they have burnt or smashed. In front of our new positions runs an Empire of Death—a Death which lays the shrivelled hands of destruction upon all the works of Man and all the bloom of Nature." This, "by order of the High German Command."

It was the last word of Barbarity! But what the Berliner Tageblatt and the Lokalanzeiger did not tell their readers, Jeb now realized with a shudder, would have made a chapter of degeneracy and revolting crime unparalleled in history.

Yet, even in the face of this, he turned sick at the thought of going forward to the certain annihilation awaiting him in that ghostly wilderness of mist and wet and wreckage ahead. On the other hand, how in God's name could he keep from going, he asked himself, when the blood of innocents was calling on every side! He felt again the "something strong within him which commanded";—but he hated it!

Had Dr. Barrow been sufficiently skillful with the knife, he might have dissected out this better Jeb who insisted on going forward, and let the other crawl into a shell hole to hide for the rest of time; then both Jebs would have been supremely satisfied. But, being first and foremost a courageous man, he did not suspect that any one of his unit could possibly falter. Jeb knew this, and it made him feel all the more alone.

They reached a rise in the rolling landscape and stopped to breathe their beasts which were shaking the heavy limbers by their desperate gasps for air. The ground sloped down and up again, and there, protected from the enemy, a new world came into view—a world wherein American, French and English engineers, commanding an army of construction, worked feverishly, as ants. For an instant the nobler Jeb prevailed, and he raised his eyes in a mute prayer of thankfulness for this trio of forces—the strongest combination the world has ever seen! The rumbling cannon ceased to jar his nerves, while he gazed wistfully at the low clouds sweeping by in companies that seemed to hasten from this theatre of wrath. Occasional gusts of white smoke burst into being just beneath them and hung a moment suspended before racing on; or a distant squirt of lace-like shrapnel, curving ever downward, came to see what went on behind the Allied lines.

Beyond these gusts and squirts of man-made clouds, observation balloons—the "sausages" of the enemy—floated motionless above the horizon, sometimes catching a fleck of sunlight and glistening like dull silver. There were no German fliers in the air that day, but high above, as gray vultures hungrily soaring over one spot, two American, two British and four French airmen glided back and forth, in and out, circling, circling. With such grace and ease did they pirouette through their reconnaisance that Jeb was reminded of an aerial quadrille being danced five thousand feet above the earth; or, seeming to tire of this, one of them would change the play to hide-and-seek, point toward the translucent blue and scoot behind a cloud, with the others following. It was a cordial invitation for the Boche to come up and fight! Jeb did not see them again for several minutes, but he noticed that one of the kite balloons suddenly burst into a little puff of flame and disappeared. Unconsciously, he grinned.

"Sacre bleu!" the poilu cried delightedly. "More honor to our '75's'!"

"I thought the planes did it!" Jeb turned in surprise.

"Oh, no, Monsieur! That was done by one of our guns six miles away!"

Below the pirouetting airmen there was no poetry of motion. Here men strained and panted and wiped grimy sweat from their eyes. A month ago this ground ahead had been vigorously contested—the very spot on which Jeb now stood had been well within the German lines.

In the thoroughness with which the engineers were making fast their gains, a military observer would have read that not only would the Allied army draw the sting from this "empire of death," but that never again would this part of France be yielded to alien hands. As far as the eye could reach roads were being improved, others made; the buried railways were being excavated, metals straightened, or replaced if too far bent; shell-proof dug-outs were having their finishing touches, some to be used as dressing-stations for the wounded whom to-morrow might bring in, others for storing ammunition. In a nearby wood, where trees had been reduced to little more than gaunt trunks barren of leaf and twig, observation posts were built with many tons of branches hauled from the rear, and so artfully wired in place that the stricken giants seemed almost ready to live again. This work in itself constituted reason enough for the Allied airmen to sweep the sky of German observers, since only by "putting out the enemy's eye" could such secrets of camouflage be preserved. Wells were being bored by gas engine power and pipes laid, as spider webs, to bring untainted water to man and beast. Then, of course, shallow trenches had to be dug for telephone wires which otherwise would perish in the first onslaught of artillery fire.

Among the trenches of greater magnitude, recently pounded to the point of obliteration, activities were being pressed at highest tension, for here the destruction had been particularly severe. The Germans had held them well, but no human agency could have prevailed against the unfaltering valor of the Allies. Now they were in Allied hands, and being prepared for Allied shelter. From sunken approaches to the assembly trenches, and from there forward through an intricate maze of communicating passages to the firing trench, tens of thousands of men were busy with pick and shovel—not, however, constructing the narrow, steep-sided affairs which proved so disastrous to the Germans on the Somme, but a shallower type of trench having more flare and a wider sole. Just behind them worked the plumbers and pipemen, the carpenters and timber placers, the electricians with their coils of wire and telephones; everything perfected with the greatest nicety today, which tomorrow—or the next, or next, tomorrow—would be buried for future plowshares. War could not be war unless it were the highest expression of construction and destruction, even as it raises life and death to the highest power of sublimity!

Boring like huge worms from the front line outward, were tunnellers, biting into the earth with grim persistence to lay mines beneath the enemy; not that this work would be finished in time for tomorrow's action, wherein plans were already completed to press forward, but should the German positions prove firm enough to establish another temporary deadlock, then they would serve a purpose. By such forethought are battles won, when nothing is underestimated, nothing overlooked, no shade of opportunity neglected, and all chances accounted for.

"I never dreamed it was so gigantic a game as this," Jeb gasped.

"But there is much more, Monsieur," his companion smiled.

"Does no one ever rest?" Jeb asked, in a voice of awe.

"Oh, yes, Monsieur," the poilu smiled again. "In places where the trenches have been cleared and mended, where telephone wires have been connected to instruments, where water pipes have been brought down and fauceted, flooring built across mucky places, gas gongs installed, ammunition, grenades and tinned food stored in the newly finished shell-proof chambers, you will find a few over-exhausted men sprawled out, sleeping."

While Jeb could see nothing of this, the driver promised to get him into it soon enough—a suggestion that turned him away in search of other scenes and thoughts. Off to the right two lines of snags marked what had once been graceful poplars edging a famous route national, but now——! He glanced quickly backward along the direction from which he came. Here, at first, a brighter prospect met his eyes: the far-off rolling slopes were green, the far-off woods had not been stripped of leaves; but never could the grim story be quite wiped out for, across this verdant scene, as a long, thin reptile with a million legs, crawled an endless line of artillery and munition trains.

"Can't I ever get away from it!" he cried to himself, shutting his eyes in agony.

The horses had been rested and word came to proceed; the limbers creaked and moved. Jeb gripped the seat in terror, feeling now that before they got half way down the slope a German gunner would pick them out and touch the magic spring which reduces men—not symbolically but literally—to dust. Yet he breathed more freely and sent another prayer up for the engineers when almost at once they entered a sunken road, converging toward the enemy although keeping well out of sight. At places where the terrain did not admit of this shelter, or other roads went off at tangents, long strips of canvas were stretched across the openings, their outer sides being painted, in theatre scenery fashion, to represent the surrounding ground. If the Germans had only known that thousands of troops and thousands of tons of ammunition passed daily within easy range of their guns, protected by a wall of 10-ounce canvas! Another important reason for sweeping their planes from the sky!

The poilu called Jeb's attention to these ingenious devices of camouflage, seeming to think them a great joke.

"But for the good God having made the Boche, Monsieur, I should call them asses with long ears for never estimating our finesse and resource."

"It wouldn't be disrespectful, Frenchie," one of the unit laughed, "because the good God made asses, too!"

"Well, Monsieur, I feel there should be an apology somewhere! Perhaps it is to the four-footed asses."

They climbed down at last and, each loaded with supplies, tramped through half a mile of communicating trenches to the protected dressing-stable dug-outs—roomy affairs, twenty feet below the surface and opening rearward into a kind of quadrangle. Five hundred yards ahead were the firing trenches, where things would happen; and the poilu, observing this, grimly remarked:

"Sacre bleu! They certainly have ordered you up to the very front, Monsieur! 'Tis not often the women are brought so close—but it means, Monsieur, that our Generals are positive of driving the Boche far back tomorrow!"

The chief surgeon in charge here rushed to meet them with open arms, embracing Dr. Barrow warmly; and then Barrow stepped back to look at him, for this was the great Bonsecours! Georges Bonsecours! He saw a man of medium height, and of medium build, slightly gray about his temples, and in the neighborhood of forty years of age. No one of these things was particularly distinguishing, but when he spoke—ah, then the impelling magnetism which drew others close to him, the force which sent them flying off to various duties, was easily explained. His eyes, while twinkling merrily as though everything in life possessed a touch of humor, also gave the impression that they could see beneath five layers of skin tissue—that by some canny second sight they could detect a piece of shrapnel without the aid of probes or X-ray; but a closer inspection showed that they were set in a face which had become seamed by weariness. His arms, also, hung with a directness that indicated great fatigue.

While supplies were being stored away and the women nurses had retired for a needed rest, the world-famed surgeon escorted Dr. Barrow farther down the line of dressing-stations, particularly to see his own unit which had been in this sector since the middle of April.

"Monsieur le Doctor," he said,—then continued in beautiful English—"I am greatly impressed with the fortitude of your American women who have assisted me. There is one—but why mention one, when they all typify to my mind graceful columns of ivory; pure in their strength and certainty, crystal in their thoughts and deeds! My operating table is a Grecian temple, Monsieur, when they surround it."

"That is a beautiful tribute," said Barrow, flushing with pride.

"Not as beautiful, Monsieur, as the inspiration and assistance which one of them has given me." He stopped, blushing like a girl, then continued frankly with an infectious smile: "We learn to be outspoken on the edge of No Man's Land—perhaps it is because we never know at what moment our lips may be completely sealed that we appreciate the value of saying fearlessly what is in our minds; therefore I will finish by telling you that, next to an Allied victory, my greatest hope is that she may be persuaded to share my fortune in Paris, after we are finished with the fortunes of war!"

"I could wish no girl better luck than that," Barrow smiled. "To us at home you stand as a kind of demi-god, a wizard, who——"

"Ah, Monsieur, I have accomplished nothing, really, until I came here, where her sympathy and bravery have made me see new things! I tell her that she inherits these traits from an angel mother and an American Indian father."

Both men laughed delightedly; Dr. Barrow little dreaming at the moment that this American girl, beloved by every one around her, was the daughter of an old friend who edited a paper down—or was it up?—in Hillsdale.

"You see that we are close to things here," Bonsecours continued, as they walked along.

"I had wondered about the women being so near the front," Barrow replied.

"Well, Monsieur, in some sectors this position is safer for them than farther back—only, of course, when our artillery and line is as strong as here, and the dressing-stations as well protected. Besides," he added softly, "we are needing many nurses, and have lost fearfully in men and orderlies."

The sun set clear that evening, putting a sparkle in the air which touched one's nerves like wine. Shortly before twilight Jeb was drawn to the entrance of his dug-out by the tramping and sloshing of many feet. He walked the length of the quadrangle to where it joined a communicating trench and for half an hour—even after the night had grown too dark to see distinctly—watched an incessant line of soldiery moving forward to positions. Tramp, tramp, they went, under orders of silence, because something big was on the boards for tomorrow. But 'twas not the quiet of glumness that enveloped them, for they showed in every step an elasticity of spirits, as of muscles. He might have called it a fluid line, so lithely did it flow by; he might have called it a line of gods, so proudly did each man hold his steel-capped head!

The firing trench lay about six hundred yards from the German first line; six hundred yards of No Man's Land waiting passively for the shambles! Jeb wrung his hands and leaned against the earthen wall. With that stark struggle for existence but a few hours off, how was it possible for men to step out happily! What would he be doing, were he amongst them!

The line was still passing, coming out of the impenetrable and marching—who knew where! when he stumbled through the dark entrance of the dug-out.

"What's going on out there?" a comrade asked.

"Ghosts," he answered, feeling for his bunk and throwing himself face down on it.

He was tired to exhaustion, his nerves were starved for rest. The dug-out was chilly after sundown and he reached fumblingly for his blanket, found himself lying upon it and awkwardly wriggled under.

The warmth was good. In a little while the steady tramp of men going to kill or die—for 'tis thus the gods play with us!—became a soothing lullaby, and lured him into sleep.