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By Root 4644 0

would waste much time or breath grieving, nor would Ludendorff have time to breathe either or spend gloating, because he would still have to envelop and reduce every tree in every wood and every stone in every wall in all England, not to mention three men in every pub that he would have to tear down brick by brick to get to them. And it would not matter when he did, because there would be another pub at the next crossroads with three more men in it and there were simply just not that many Germans nor anybody else in Europe or anywhere else, and he unrolled the Sidcott; at first there had been a series of little smoldering overlapping rings across the front of it, but DOW it had become one single sprawling ragged loop spreading, creeping up toward the collar and down toward the belt and across toward each armpit, until by morning the whole front would be gone probably. Because it was constant, steadfast, invincible and undeviable; you could depend on it as Ball had, and McCudden and Bishop and Rhys Davies and Barker, and Boelcke and Richthofen and Immelman and Guynemer and Nun-gcsser and the Americans like Monaghan who had been willing to die even before their country was actually in it to give them a roster of names to brag about; and the troops on the ground, in the mud, the poor bloody infantry-all of them who hadn't asked to be safe nor even to not to be let down again tomorrow always by the brass hats who had done the best they could too probably, but asked only that the need for the unsafeness and the fact that all of them had dared it and a lot of them had accepted it and in consequence were now no more, be held by the nations at Paris and Berlin and Washington and London and Rome immune and unchallengeable above all save brave victory itself and as brave defeat, to the one of which it would give glory and from the other efface the shame.

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY still crowding steadily up to pass through the gate had already entered the city in mind and spirit long before their bodies reached it, their anxiety and dread already one with the city's vast and growing reservoir of it, while their bodies still choked the slow converging roads.

They had begun to arrive yesterday, Tuesday, when news of the regiment's mutiny and arrest first reached the district and before the regiment itself had even been brought back to Chaulnesmont for the old supreme generalissimo himself to decide its fate. They continued to pour into the city all that night, and this morning they still came, on the heels of the regiment, in the very dust of the lorries which had rushed it back to the city and into it and through it without stopping, coming on foot and in clumsy farm carts, to crowd through the gate where the young woman stood scanning each face with strained and indefatigable rapidity-villagers and farmers, laborers and artisans and publicans and clerks and smiths: other men who in their turn had served in the regiment, other men and women who were parents and kin of the men who belonged to it now and, because of that fact, were now under close guard beneath the threat of execution in the prisoners' compound on the other side of the town-other men and women who, but for sheer blind chance and luck, might have been the parents and kin this time, andsome of them-would certainly be the next.

It was little they knew on that first day when they left their homes, and they would learn but little more from the others on the same mutual errand of desperation and terror whom they met or overtook or were overtaken by before they reached the city: only that at dawn yesterday morning the regiment had mutinied, refused to make an attack. It had not failed in an attack: it had simply refused to make one, to leave the trench, not before nor even as the attack started, but afterward-had, with no prewarning, no intimation even to the most minor lance-corporal among the officers designated to lead it, declined to perform that ritual act which, after four years, had become as much and as inescapable Tuesday a part of the formal ritual of war as the Grand