er on the stage.

Zaidos noticed this, and felt it himself. He saw men go singing along
the trenches to their death, singing love songs and tender little
ballads that had to do with flowers and larks and English lanes in May.
And most of all he noticed that the face of every wounded man held a
look of surprise in greater or less degree; of amazement, as though the
outraged body said, "Has this thing come to _me_? Impossible!" The
look was on the dead lying sprawled and twisted in the last silent
paralysis of humanity. And although the dead and dying and wounded lay
like warnings of a coming fate, although men tossed and reared
grotesquely, and shattered horses screamed shrilly in throes of blind
agony, the unhurt thousands moved on or lay in their trenches giving
fire for fire, death for death without a quiver of concern.

Out into the worst of it went the boys together, Zaidos filled with the
high courage of one who does his duty whole-heartedly, and is too busy
with the task to wonder at his own fate, Velo with the unconcern of the
panther who creeps sure-footedly along the crumbling ledge after his
prey. With the noise, the sights and confusion of battle, a kind of
madness grew in Velo. The words "To-day, to-day, to-day!" made a sort
of song within him. He had all the time in the world. He liked to see
Zaidos working, working, tiring himself out. It didn't really matter
when he put Zaidos out. He only knew that sooner or later he would do
it. He had become a criminal. The evil had wrecked his soul.

The boys worked with furious zeal. When the final toll of this
dreadful war is taken, high up on the lists of fame, supreme in the
immortal and shining roster of the saints, should stand the names of
the men and women of the Red Cross. The zeal of fighting could not
uphold them. The lust of battle could not inflame their courage. It
was theirs to walk unguarded in the red rain of death, to kneel where
the shells fell thickest, to pass through the line of deadly fire with
their pitiful burdens.

Doing only good, bringing relief and rescue, they, too, have fallen,
hundreds of them, victims of a struggle in which they had no active
part.

Zaidos and that dark shadow, Velo, knelt beside a wounded soldier, and
strove to save his life, while a black robed priest knelt beside the
conscious man. He made the responses of his Church clearly and evenly.
He listened while the chaplain commended him to the mercy