The latter is a handsome, sturdy man. Everything neat about him, although he has lain so long with his men in the trenches. Close up to him the soldier stands, so that he can feel the other's breath--but it doesn't smell of brandy. The gray eyes hold him fast while he speaks. Not a muscle moves. But suddenly he laughs in the messenger's face. "Good. Now ride back. And say to your colonel that he has miscalculated if he believes that I shall not open fire if you try to sneak in behind those unfortunates. I know my duty, and should innocent blood be shed the blame will rest on you." He speaks and turns upon his heel. The sentinel leads the dejected messenger back to his horse and calls scornfully after him: "Are you really so stupid or did you think that we were so stupid?" The latter makes no answer. But a few steps further on he strips the white flag from his lance and throws it in the muck. Then that was the colonel's idea. And he will stick to it. At his command they are to hide like cowards behind the victims who are to be pushed--as a living wall--up to the enemy's trenches! "They are, of course, only Jews," he says to himself. "But yet--but yet----" Why does he feel that way about it? Suddenly he realizes. Like a picture it stands before him. The sputtering fire about which the half-frozen Jews are huddled together--women, children, grizzled old men. Here and there a sentinel to guard them. He, too, one of the guards. IV--IN HIS BREAST HIS OWN BULLET Like shadows they crouch about the fire, rub the freezing hands of the children between their own, weep, groan, pray softly. One has prayer boxes bound on his brow and on his arms and nods and bows unceasingly, so that his shadow dances like a curious grotesque against the light of the fire. The Cossacks laugh. He, too, has laughed, carelessly, unconcerned. Laughed until he has suddenly noticed the woman at the side of the bearded Jew--with the slumbering child at her breast. Something in that sight appealed to him strangely. But then they had summoned him before the sotnik. And he had thought of it no more. How sharply that whole picture stands before him now--and among the other details especially these three: The man in prayer, the shivering mother bent toward the fire, her head cloth like a veil drawn deep over the unconscious, slumbering child. "Bethlehem," he murmurs reverently, and crosses himself. And he is going to take part to-day in this infamy--he, a Christian! Then it must be true what they believe back home. That the Pravoslavine is Anti-Christ. And he fights with him--for him--is part of his army. Have they then altered the text of the Holy Books? So that some day God's word of love will no longer be found in it--the Holy Word spoken by Him who lay in the womb of a daughter of the House of David? It must be so! It must be so! And if till to-day he has doubted it, now all is clear. Only Anti-Christ can give such orders.