houlders, and gun-muzzles
kept on marching past the smoke and flare of the deserted camp-fires
that lighted thicket and grassy plot along the trail. And after the
flames had died down to cinders--in the same black terrible silence, the
hosts were marching still.

That night a last good-by to all womankind, but wife, mother, sister,
sweetheart. The world was to be a man's world next day, and the man a
coarse, dirty, sweaty, swearing, good-natured, grimly humorous, cruel,
kindly soldier, feverish for a fight and as primitive in passion as a
cave-dweller fighting his kind for food. The great little fight was at
hand.

XI

Before dawn again--everything in war begins at dawn--and the thickets
around a certain little gray stone fort alive with slouch hat, blue
blouse, and Krag-Jorgensen, slipping through the brush, building no
fires, and talking in low tones for fear the timorous enemy would see,
or hear, and run before the American sharpshooter could get a chance to
try his marksmanship; wondering, eight hours later, if the timorous
enemy were ever going to run. Eastward and on a high knoll stripped of
bushes, four 3.2 guns unlimbered and thrown into position against that
fort and a certain little red-roofed town to the left of it. This was
Caney.

Eastward still, three miles across an uneven expanse of green, jungle
and jungle-road alive with men, bivouacing fearlessly around and under
four more 3.2 guns planted on another high-stripped knoll--El Poso--and
trained on a little pagoda-like block-house, which sat like a Christmas
toy on top of a green little, steep little hill from the base of which
curved an orchard-like valley back to sweeping curve of the jungle. This
was San Juan.

Nature loves sudden effects in the tropics. While Chaffee fretted in
valley-shadows around Caney and Lawton strode like a yellow lion past
the guns on the hill and, eastward, gunner on the other hill at El Poso
and soldier in the jungle below listened westward, a red light ran like
a flame over the east, the tops of the mountains shot suddenly upward
and it was day--flashing day, with dripping dew and birds singing and a
freshness of light and air that gave way suddenly when the sun quickly
pushed an arc of fire over the green shoulder of a hill and smote the
soldiers over and under the low trees like rays from an open furnace.

It smote Reynolds as he sat by the creek under the guns before San Juan,
idly watching water bubble in