An orderly ushered two officers of the Foreign Legion, young men in mud-stained khaki, through the door of a dugout back of the fighting line in France. As they entered the hut a French officer in horizon blue, equally muddy, rose and returned the American’s salute. “You will be seated?” He pushed camp chairs toward them. A guttering candle, stuck in a bottle neck, veiled rather than revealed the sordid interior. The light flickered across the young Frenchman’s face, threw gaunt shadows under his eyes emphasized the look of utter weariness and—there was something more. The senior officer of the Legion, Captain Hailes, looked at him keenly. “Major Fouquet, we report at headquarters in an hour, sir. Lieutenant Agor, commanding platoon at extreme right—contact platoon with your battalion, sir, reports we lost touch with the French forces between the advance and the first trench. Thought it might have been his watch, but the timepiece checks up to a second.” The captain hesitated uneasily, “We are not presuming to question, sir, but Lieutenant Agor says he saw—we felt there might have been some cause, some reason that did not appear, so we came—” The Frenchman lifted his head in a stupid way altogether foreign to his usual manner. “Merci, Captain Hailes. We were—forty seconds slow in attacking the first trench, sir.” He went on mechanically as if delivering a rehearsed report. “Caught up and reached the second trench on time. Few prisoners besides the children. Enemy practically wiped out.” He concluded heavily, a dazed look blotting all expression. “There was a cause for the forty seconds delay, Major?” Fouquet struggled up out of the curious apathy. He cleared his throat, made several attempts to speak and finally blurted out. “You won’t believe it—I saw it and I cannot! But there are the children—and a first-line trench full of dead Huns—without a mark on them! Barres was flying over us—he saw the Battalion—knew them for old comrades. The women—all of them saw the faces of their dead! I don’t believe it, sir,—but how did we do it? The women never thrust once in the first trench—the children haven’t a wound—that’s got to prove it!” He stopped abruptly—looking from one to the other with a gesture of hopeless protest. The Americans regarded him with puzzled eyes. “Was it some new trick of the Huns? God knows they’ve given them to us in plenty! Can you tell us—it might—?” Fouquet pulled himself forward, his knuckles whitening with his grip of the table edge. “You know the history of the section of the Front the Avengers retook to-day?” “No, Major Fouquet. We came in later, with the Canadians.” “It began with the great retreat of 1914, sir, when the Germans were driving us back toward Paris. They had crowded our army against the river. Between the slow crossing and their terrible artillery fire, new to us then, we faced annihilation!” There was a rustle at the door of the dugout and a whispered password. Fouquet did not pause.