mm. Rimailho) guns available for a reply to the German batteries and

they could not retake the town. About midnight, the city burst into flames.

That same Saturday had been one of disaster, also, for the Fourth Army, though in a lesser degree. Horace had partaken in the retreat from Givet, though, naturally, he did not know the character of the engagement, the night before. All next morning he stayed by the battery, acting as a driver, but the battery was not in action more than an hour. The army suffered heavily, but retreated in good order, the line stiffening, and holding the Germans in check. The battery slept that night on heaps of straw in a little chapel.

A dispatch-rider on a motor-cycle whizzed by. He was traveling thirty or forty miles an hour on a road which was nothing more than a series of holes and ruts. A few guns fired from time to time, but the air reverberated with the grumbling breathing of that master of modern war--petrol.

At half-past two o'clock the sergeant came.

"Get up there, Battery Two. There's coffee ready outside."

The little red lamp over the altar in the chapel burned steadily and comfortingly; the red camp fires in the village streets wavered in the chill air of the early morning. A heavy dew had fallen. The German guns were beginning to speak in the distance, but, as it seemed, sleepily and sulkily.

"Those are the ten- and thirteen-centimeter pop-guns," said a gunner, listening.

"And they've all the seventy-sevens in the world, there," added another, "hear those bunches of sixes coming over!"

The sky was still dark enough to show the distant flashes of the heavier guns, like the glare from the eyes of a herd of giant beasts of prey.

As the day lightened, in the half-dawn, the columns of earth upthrown by the shells seemed like gray specters that appeared for a moment and then vanished. An 8.2-inch (220 mm.) shell buried itself in the ground behind the battery, drawn up at the edge of the village, waiting for orders to take up position, and then, thirty seconds after, exploded like a miniature volcano.

From the distance came the clacking of the motor-cycle.

"That's the dispatch-rider again," muttered Horace, turning to watch the flying rider, though his ears warned him of a heavy shell humming on its way, and a few seconds later, the wind of its passage blew cold upon his cheek.

The next second, the earth heaved itself up as though a subterraneous monster were emerging from its lair, and the 10.1-inch (270 mm.) shell[14] burst with a slow majestic grandeur. A tree near by, at whose roots the shell had fallen and burrowed, was tossed into the air like a twig. In the pattering silence as the fragments of the shell and earth hurled outward, a shrill human scream penetrated.

Through the cloud of salmon-colored dust, with its gagging acrid fumes, could be seen the motor-cycle. It had plunged off sharply from the road, jumped a low ditch and was stuck fast in a thick, dense hedge. The motors were running still. The rider--

Horace jumped from the back of the wheel-horse, followed by a couple of the gunners, and ran across the road. The lad stopped the motor while the gunners lifted the cyclist from the saddle. He was terribly mangled. Horace turned his eyes away, in spite of himself.

"Let me go on!" cried the rider, in a voice so full of agony that it was almost a screech. "I have dispatches."

They laid him down on the grass by the edge of the road, grass scorched and crispened by the explosion.

The dispatch-rider looked up and saw the major, who had hurried to the scene.

"Dispatches! They are life or death for France!" he gasped.

The major stooped down and the wounded man guttered out a few sentences, while feebly trying to reach the paper he bore.

Life was ebbing fast, but though the man's sufferings must have been intense, he said no word of himself. Only he cried out again.

"I have dispatches!"

Then the major, in order that the gallant soldier should not die in the despair of an unaccomplished trust, answered, in a firm tone,

"They shall be delivered. I promise it."

The dispatch-rider smiled through all his pain.

"My France!" he whispered proudly, and tried to salute the officer.

The major laid his hand lightly on the terribly torn body.

"It is not you, who salute me," he said, "but I, who salute you!"

With those words in his ears, the dispatch-rider joined the immortal host of the dead heroes of France.

FOOTNOTES:

[14] In strict accuracy, this particular type of gun was not in use until the following spring.