ds of discipline was in
the ascendant, and it sought the highway, even as water keeps to the
river bed. Like specks on the laboring tide was the white of bandages.
An ambulance trying to cut out to one side was overturned. The frantic
chauffeur and hospital-corps orderly were working to extricate the
wounded from their painful position. A gun was overturned against the
ambulance. A melee of horses and men was forming at the foot of the
garden gate in front of the narrowing bounds of the road into the town,
as a stream banks up before a jam of driftwood. The struggle for right
of way became increasingly wild; the dam of men, horses, and wagons
grew. A Brown dirigible was descending toward the great target; but on
closer view its commander forbore, the humane impulse outweighing the
desire for retribution for colleagues in camp and mess who had gone down
in a holocaust in the aerial battles of the night.

Thus far the flight had seemed in the face of an unseen pursuer, like
that of an army fleeing from some power visible to itself but not to
Marta. Now she began to observe the flashes of rifles from the crests
that the rear-guards of the Grays were deserting; then the rush of the
Brown skirmish line to close quarters. Her glance pausing long on no
detail, so active the landscape with its swarms and tumult, returned to
the scene in front of the house. A Gray field-battery, cutting out to
one side of the road, knocking over flimsier vehicles and wounded who
got in the way, careening, its drivers cursing and officers shouting,
galloped out in the open field and unlimbered to support a regiment of
infantry that was hastily intrenching as a point to steady the
retreating masses on its front and protect them in their flight when
they had passed.

Marta saw how desperately the gunners worked; she could feel their
fatigue. Nature had sunk in her heart a partisanship for the under dog.
She who had stood for the three against five, now stood for the shaken,
bewildered five in the cockpit under the fire of the three. Her
sympathies went out to every beaten, weary Gray soldier. What was the
difference between a Gray and a Brown? Weren't they both made of flesh
and bone and blood and nerves?

Under the awful spell of the panorama, she did not see Westerling, who
had stopped only a few feet distant with his aide and his valet, nor did
he notice her as the tumult glazed his eyes. He was as an artist who
looks on the ribbons of the ca