back slowly. He
forgot all about himself and his own fate in his desire to see every act
of the gigantic drama as it passed before him. He took no thought of
escape at present, nor did Fleury, who stood beside him. The fire of the
guns great and small had now blended into the usual steady thunder,
beneath which human voices could be heard.

"We don't have the forty-two centimeters, nor the great siege guns,"
said Fleury, "but the French field artillery is the best in the world.
It's undoubtedly holding back the German hosts and covering the French
advance."

"That's my opinion, too," said John. "I saw its wonderful work in the
retreat toward Paris. I think it saved the early French armies from
destruction."

The German army was made of stern material. Having planted its feet here
it refused to be driven back. Its cannon was a line of flaming
volcanoes, its cavalry charged again and again into the face of death,
and its infantry perished in masses, but the stern old general spared
nothing. Passing up and down the lines, listening at the telephone and
receiving the reports of air scouts and land scouts, he always hurled
in fresh troops at the critical points and Fritz and Karl and Wilhelm
and August, sober and honest men, went forward willingly, sometimes
singing and sometimes in silence, to die for a false and outworn system.
John as a prisoner had a better view than he would have had if with the
French army. In a country open now he could see a full mile to right and
left, where the German hosts marched again and again to attack, and
while the French troops were too far away for his eyes he beheld the
continuous flare of their fire, like a broad red ribbon across the whole
western horizon.

The passing of time was nothing to him. He forgot all about it in his
absorption. But the sun climbed on, afternoon came, and still the battle
at this point raged, the French unable to drive the Germans farther and
the Germans unable to stop the French attacks. John roused himself and
endeavored to dissociate the thunder on their flanks from that in front,
and, after long listening, he was able to make the separation, or at
least he thought so. He knew now that the struggle there was no less
fierce than the one before him.

The Kaiser himself must be present with one or the other of these
armies, and a man who had talked for more than twenty years of his
divine right, his shining armor, his invincible sword and his mailed
fist