German reinforcement.

A queer sense had come to us from the Austrians. I had thought of
it many times and others had spoken the same: that it didn't matter
greatly to them. They gave us fierce fighting, but always when we
were exhausted and insane with our dead--they fell away before us.
This had happened so often that we came to expect it, our chief puzzle
being just how long they would hold out in each battle. Especially when
our brigade was engaged, and we had entered into an intensity that was
all the human could endure, I would almost stop breathing in the
expectancy of the release of tension before us. When it did not come,
I invariably found afterward that I was out of perspective with the
mainline, on account of the fierceness of our immediate struggle. We
were but one snapping loop of the fighting--too localized to affect
the main front. The Austrians gave all in a piece, when they drew back.

Days were the same, a steady suffering. I did not know before what
men could stand. We had weeks of life that formerly I would have
considered fatal to adventure with through one night or day--exposure,
fatigue, famine--and over all the passion for home, that slow lasting
fire. I began to understand how the field-mice winter--how the northern
birds live through, and what a storm, on top of a storm, means to all
creatures of the north country that are forced to take what comes, when
the earth tilts up into the bleak and icy gray. We forget this as men,
until a war comes.

But all measuring of the world had ceased for our eyes. A man must
have emotions for this, and we thought our emotions dead. I wonder
if it can be understood--this being shaken down to the end, this facing
of life and death without a personal relation?... Crawling out of the
blanket in the morning, I have met the cold--such a shock throughout,
that it centered like a long pin driven in the heart. I have seen my
friends go, right and left on the field--those who helped tend the fire
the night before--and met their end and my own peril without a quickened
pulse. Of course, I knew something was changed for me, because I had not
been this way. I had even lost the love of courage--that quality of
field-work that used to raise my hair, so high and pure did it seem to
my eyes.... But the night came, when I heard a little man mumbling over
the fire to the effect that he hated it all--that the Little Father was
making monkeys of us all--and a thrill shot over