here had done
more than any other single occurrence in the progress of the
conflagration to demoralize the department and spread dismay in its
ranks. It may have been the fact that this great building had been
held to be safe beyond a doubt; it may have been merely that these men
had for nearly twelve hours been achieving and repeating the
impossible, the heroic, and that this last blow had been more than they
could bear. Their faces were gray beneath the smoke and grime, their
eyes stung and smarted almost unendurably from the heat and smoke and
their long vigil; and now for the first time since this whirling
maelstrom had engulfed them, they were finding the opportunity to
realize that human endurance is not supernal.

There was another reason why they realized this now, and that was that
the bitterness of this last defeat had, for the moment, broken their
hearts. So long as they had fought with a gambler's chance, with the
barest hope of success, it was easy to forget they were hungry, were
weary unto death, were human at all. But under the numbing stroke of
this last setback, they suddenly felt all these things.

The most heart-breaking thing, perhaps, in human experience is
impotence in the face of trying need. A man can stand well enough the
ordinary vicissitudes of life; but to be confronted with an exigency
that finds and leaves him utterly helpless is enough to crush the
bravest spirit. The Irish soldiery that four times tried to scale
Marye's Heights, which were not for scaling by any mortal men, felt
this bitterness, and the mere memory of them preserves the image for
the world. It is this same feeling that makes the injured football
player cry like a child after he is recalled to the sidelines, and that
makes a man in the grip of an undertow give up and sink. It is because
they are called upon to combat forces against which their mightiest
muscular efforts are as futile as the flirting of a fan in jeweled
fingers.

Nowhere is this more terribly felt than by men facing a great fire; for
here not only have they to deal with a power out of all proportion to
humanity, but they confront a power perverse, saturnine, malignant,
diabolic. A conflagration is wantonly cruel; not content with the
simple panoply of its might, it summons to its aid the evil whims of an
enraged elephant. It plays, like a kitten, with hope before it crushes
and kills it. The spectacle of a building soaked and saturated in
w