“The trumpet screeched ‘forward,’ and the column quickened into life,” Routledge explained, “sprang like magic into formation and swept past, panting, laughing, shouting in the rain. God, pity them! They were good boys--good boys, all. I wish they had all come back with their dreams all turned true.... They didn’t know what was ahead, except they had seen the blind gray stones of the wall through the dusk at the end of the day’s march. They didn’t know what the fight was about, but they ran to break the wall, gladly, against the rock of centuries--into fire and steel and the yellow hate from all the hells. It meant nothing to them after the wall was broken. That’s the queer, ugly part of it. The man in the ranks always gets the worst end--and so pitifully often doesn’t even have a sentiment to enthuse over. He’s apt to fall in a fight against as good friends as he has anywhere on this spinning planet, and what meaning has the change of national boundaries to his mother?” Routledge was thoughtful for a moment.... “It seems hard to use grown-ups like that--men, white men, with spines at right-angles from the snake’s, and a touch of eternity in their insides somewhere. Poor devils, getting the worst of it--that’s always the way!... I watched the tail of the column swaying by--watched the last fragments blotted up in the rain and the night. Already, in a red mist on the Tientsin Wall the dance of death had begun.” Noreen’s eyes were filled with mysteries and mistiness. As in his work, Routledge now suggested to her volumes unsaid. Her heart sensed the great wealth of the man. She felt an inner expansion. Pity was almost a passion in his face; and there was hate, too--hate for the manipulations of the rulers of the earth, which drove forward that poor column cursing and coughing in the rain. She saw it all--as if she had been at his side that night--the fire-lit field running with the reddest blood of earth. And across the world she seemed to see the faces of the maids and mothers of these boys--faces straining toward them, all white with tragedy. And more, she seemed to see for an instant the Face of the high God, averted from His images, because they were obsessed in that profane hour by the insane devils of war.... The profile of Routledge fascinated her. He had spoken lightly--as he was accustomed to speak before men to whom war was a career--but the aroused girl saw in his eyes, tightly drawn against the lamp-light, a mystic’s rebellion against the inhumanity of material power. About his eyes and graven entire upon the tropically embrowned face was a look impossible to the men her life had known. * * * * * “I was tangled up in a reserve of Russian infantry afterward,” Routledge concluded. “Jerry, you’ve heard the Russians sing?” “Aye, at Plevna and before, son.”