damned fools--"

Perspiration streamed down the youth's face, which was soiled like that
of a weeping urchin. He frequently, with a nervous movement, wiped his
eyes with his coat sleeve. His mouth was still a little ways open.

He got the one glance at the foe-swarming field in front of him, and
instantly ceased to debate the question of his piece being loaded.
Before he was ready to begin--before he had announced to himself that
he was about to fight--he threw the obedient, well-balanced rifle into
position and fired a first wild shot. Directly he was working at his
weapon like an automatic affair.

He suddenly lost concern for himself, and forgot to look at a menacing
fate. He became not a man but a member. He felt that something of
which he was a part--a regiment, an army, a cause, or a country--was in
a crisis. He was welded into a common personality which was dominated
by a single desire. For some moments he could not flee no more than a
little finger can commit a revolution from a hand.

If he had thought the regiment was about to be annihilated perhaps he
could have amputated himself from it. But its noise gave him
assurance. The regiment was like a firework that, once ignited,
proceeds superior to circumstances until its blazing vitality fades. It
wheezed and banged with a mighty power. He pictured the ground before
it as strewn with the discomfited.

There was a consciousness always of the presence of his comrades about
him. He felt the subtle battle brotherhood more potent even than the
cause for which they were fighting. It was a mysterious fraternity
born of the smoke and danger of death.

He was at a task. He was like a carpenter who has made many boxes,
making still another box, only there was furious haste in his
movements. He, in his thought, was careering off in other places, even
as the carpenter who as he works whistles and thinks of his friend or
his enemy, his home or a saloon. And these jolted dreams were never
perfect to him afterward, but remained a mass of blurred shapes.

Presently he began to feel the effects of the war atmosphere--a
blistering sweat, a sensation that his eyeballs were about to crack
like hot stones. A burning roar filled his ears.

Following this came a red rage. He developed the acute exasperation of
a pestered animal, a well-meaning cow worried by dogs. He had a mad
feeling against his rifle, which could only be used against one life at
a time. H