A great fire makes its own fuel; it finds food where no food seems to be; stone walls crumble like sugar before it; it devours iron like dry wood, and plays wild pranks with steel. To its grisly power and its reckless humor the Station was now to bear witness. The west wall had begun to crumble, and cracked and spalled by the intense heat, not alone of the direct fire, but also by radiation from the burning risks to westward, the stone was giving way. Down part of its length, where the cross walls came, it stood stoutly; but elsewhere it began gradually to weaken. Here and there a doorway broke into what might have been a solid section; in one or two cases arches crumbled; in many others inside walls or beams or stairways, falling, carried down with them another modicum of the long wall's resistive power. Atlantic Avenue near the station was now untenable, and the fire fighters were divided. Part of them were north, but most of them were south of this latest scene in the play. The disaster here had done more than any other single occurrence in the progress of the conflagration to demoralize the department and spread dismay in its ranks. It may have been the fact that this great building had been held to be safe beyond a doubt; it may have been merely that these men had for nearly twelve hours been achieving and repeating the impossible, the heroic, and that this last blow had been more than they could bear. Their faces were gray beneath the smoke and grime, their eyes stung and smarted almost unendurably from the heat and smoke and their long vigil; and now for the first time since this whirling maelstrom had engulfed them, they were finding the opportunity to realize that human endurance is not supernal. There was another reason why they realized this now, and that was that the bitterness of this last defeat had, for the moment, broken their hearts. So long as they had fought with a gambler's chance, with the barest hope of success, it was easy to forget they were hungry, were weary unto death, were human at all. But under the numbing stroke of this last setback, they suddenly felt all these things. The most heart-breaking thing, perhaps, in human experience is impotence in the face of trying need. A man can stand well enough the ordinary vicissitudes of life; but to be confronted with an exigency that finds and leaves him utterly helpless is enough to crush the bravest spirit. The Irish soldiery that four times tried to scale Marye's Heights, which were not for scaling by any mortal men, felt this bitterness, and the mere memory of them preserves the image for the world. It is this same feeling that makes the injured football player cry like a child after he is recalled to the sidelines, and that makes a man in the grip of an undertow give up and sink. It is because they are called upon to combat forces against which their mightiest muscular efforts are as futile as the flirting of a fan in jeweled fingers.