Slowly the bombardment dies down to a watchful fire against a repetition of the assault. With countless false alarms the hours of the night pass by. The gray day breaks slowly. The trenches are full of dead and No Man's Land is a sight of redoubled horror. Full daylight comes and shows the scene as desolate as ever, the long line of trenches stretching unbroken from Switzerland to the sea. All the heroism, the courage, the mad endeavor, the agony, the slaughter, what has it brought to either side? Nothing. All that the official communiqués can say, whether sent out from Berlin or from Paris, will be: "The enemy's attack was repulsed." Has nothing been gained? Yes! The French trenches are still French. From this much of French soil the foreigner's foot is banished. Aggression, greed, and hate have made another violent effort to win a strip of territory for their befouling and blackening touch, have tried--and the motionless figures on No Man's Land are France's answer. Yesterday's clouds have fled and the golden sunshine floods the ravaged fields; it pours into the windows of field hospitals on the French and German sides alike, it blesses with the hope of the future the soldier who will recover and eases the pain of him who looks upon his last sun; it shows the African sharpening his steel for the next charge, and the general planning the next assault; it shines into distant countries whence men are coming to take the places of those that have gone before. Heroes all! Yet the communiqué says only: "The enemy made a violent assault and was repulsed." CHAPTER IX THE DEMON FACES "Croquier!" "But yes, my boy, it is I!" The boy ran forward eagerly to greet his old friend, for the moment ignoring the dogs by which he was surrounded, and then stopped and looked fixedly at his comrade. "Your arm?" he queried. The hunchback shrugged one shoulder. "It is gone, as you see," he answered. "But how?" "It was my fate, no doubt," the other responded. "Destiny had decided that I should give an arm to the Germans; so, since the military authorities would not give me the opportunity to lose it at the front, I left it behind me in Paris." "What happened?" Horace persisted. "It was a little nothing," the hunchback replied. "A German bird dropped a shell out of his beak on the munitions factory where I was working." "And a splinter hit you?" "Several." "Why didn't you dodge?" "I couldn't. You see," the hunchback continued, "there was a girl there." "And then?" demanded the lad impatiently. "Don't stammer so, Croquier, tell the story!"