The priest rose wearily; through the back-drifting smoke the long battle line of the Excelsiors wavered like phantoms in the mist. Six flags flapped ghostlike above them, behind them men writhed in the trampled, bloody grass; before them the sheeted volleys rushed outward into darkness, where the dull battle lightning played. A maimed, scorched, blackened thing in the grass near by was calling on Christ; the priest went to him, turning once on his way to look back where the Special Messenger knelt beside a dead man who lay smiling at nothing through his shattered eyeglasses. IV ROMANCE The Volunteer Nurse sighed and spread out her slender, iodine-stained fingers on both knees, looking down at them reflectively. "It is different now," she said; "sentiment dies under the scalpel. In the filth and squalor of reality neither the belief in romance nor the capacity for desiring it endure long.... Even pity becomes atrophied--or at least a reflex habit; sympathy, sorrow, remain as mechanical reactions, not spontaneous emotions.... You can understand that, dear?" "Partly," said the Special Messenger, raising her dark eyes to her old schoolmate. "In the beginning," said the Nurse, dreamily, "the men in their uniforms, the drums and horses and glitter, and the flags passing, and youth--_youth_--not that you and I are yet old in years; do you know what I mean?" "I know," said the Special Messenger, smoothing out her riding gloves. "Do you remember the cadets at Oxley? You loved one of them." "Yes; you know how it was in the cities; and even afterward in Washington--I mean the hospitals after Bull Run. Young bravery--the Zouaves--the multicolored guard regiments--and a romance in every death!" She laid one stained hand over the other, fingers still wide. "But here in this blackened horror they call the 'seat of war'--this festering bullpen, choked with dreary regiments, all alike, all in filthy blue--here individuals vanish, men vanish. The schoolgirl dream of man dies here forever. Only unwashed, naked duty remains; and its inspiration, man--bloody, dirty, vermin-covered, terrible--sometimes; and sometimes whimpering, terrified, flinching, base, bereft of all his sex's glamour, all his mystery, shorn of authority, devoid of pride, pitiable, screaming under the knife.--It is different now," said the pretty Volunteer Nurse.--"The war kills more than human life." The Special Messenger drew her buckskin gloves carefully through her belt and buttoned the holster of her revolver. "I have seen war, too," she said; "and the men who dealt death and the men who received it. Their mystery remains--the glamour of a man remains for me--because he is a man." "I have heard them crying like children in the stretchers." "So have I. That solves nothing." But the Nurse went on: