which they knew nothing, but
the touch of which they could feel.

John heard a whizzing sound, he caught a glimpse of a dark object,
rushing forward at frightful velocity, and then he and his wheel reeled
beneath the force of a tremendous explosion. The shell coming from an
invisible point, miles away, had burst some distance on his right,
scattering death and wounds over a wide radius. But Vaugirard's brigades
did not stop for one instant. They cheered loudly, closed up the gap in
their line, and went on steadily as before. Some one began to sing the
Marseillaise, and in an instant the song, like fire in dry grass, spread
along a vast front. John had often wished that he could have heard the
armies of the French Revolution singing their tremendous battle hymn as
they marched to victory, and now he heard it on a scale far more
gigantic than in the days of the First French Republic.

The vast chorus rolled for miles and for all he knew other armies, far
to right and left, might be singing it, too. The immense volume of the
song drowned out everything, even that tremor in the air, caused by the
big guns. John's heart beat so hard that it caused actual physical pain
in his side, and presently, although he was unconscious of it, he was
thundering out the verses with the others.

He was riding by the side of de Rougemont, and he stopped singing long
enough to shout, at the top of his voice:

"No enemy in sight yet?"

"No," de Rougemont shouted back, "but he doesn't need to be. The German
guns have our range."

From a line on the distant horizon, from positions behind hills, the
German shells were falling fast, cutting down men by hundreds, tearing
great holes in the earth, and filling the air with an awful shrieking
and hissing. It was all the more terrible because the deadly missiles
seemed to come from nowhere. It was like a mortal hail rained out of
heaven. John had not yet seen a German, nothing but those tongues of
fire licking up on the horizon, and some little whitish clouds of smoke,
lifting themselves slowly above the trees, yet the thunder was no longer
a rumble. It had a deep and angry note, whose burden was death.

They must maintain their steady march directly toward the mouths of
those guns. John comprehended in those awful moments that the task of
the French was terrible, almost superhuman. If their nation was to live
they must hurl back a victorious foe, practically numberless, armed and
equipped wit