He approached the matter gently, experimentally, at first, telling only the less horrifying details of war; and in the men here who had remained at home he found an eager response. They gathered round him in the pool hall, and when his tale faltered, or when he broke off, feeling sick and traitorous, they urged him to resume. “Hey, John, tell us how you captured that there machine-gun nest.” And simply, without exaggeration, John told of the lone exploit for which he had been decorated by three nations. He said he crept out at daybreak and came to the nest and surprised the gunners and marched them back to the American line. Such a bald narrative, he learned after a while, would not do at all. His listeners wanted heroics and a breath-taking clash and a picture of a lone American fighting hand to hand with a dozen of the enemy and licking the whole lot of them. It took John a long time and many tellings to learn what was wanted. The questions helped. “And didn’t them cowards put up no fight at all?” “Hey, John, you don’t mean they just laid down like a bunch of sheep!” No, John perceived, he could not afford to mean anything like that. “You’re too modest,” they said, never doubting that he had more amazing things to tell; and with increasing recklessness John became less modest. He elaborated the tale, adding to it in every recital some breathless episode, some additional moment in which he missed death by a hair, some new cunning ferocity in the foe. And he was a strange person, this tall, grave man, telling his legends and feeling sickened by the telling. After a while his tale was a gorgeous thing and not like the real experience at all. But that, he began to understand, did not matter. Now he crawled forth under a red sheet of artillery fire with shells bursting like automobile motors all around him and with the sky above him like a rolling mountain of flame. He crawled inch by inch through great shell-holes, and the lead falling around him threw earth into his eyes and stung his flesh like hornets and dug graves across his path. He crept past dead bodies—American bodies, the slain and mangled of his own company, all of them gutted in the gray wet dawn; went slowly, patiently, toward that one infernal nest that was raining death on the American line; dragged himself foot by foot, seeing that one gun belching its flame and hearing above and around him the mad thundering nightmare and smelling dead flesh. Inch by inch he crawled toward that nest, his hair matted with earth, his paralyzed hands grasping his pistols, his ears running blood—inch by inch, until at last he was under the red fire of it; and for a moment he rested, with his senses reeling and his heart in his throat.... “And—and then?” gasped one.