actually conscious of being dazed. He could feel his dulled mid groping
after the form and colour of this incident. He wondered why he did not
feel some keen agony of fear cutting his sense like a knife. He wondered
at this, because human expression had said loudly for centuries that men
should feel afraid of certain things, and that all men who did not feel
this fear were phenomena--heroes.

He was, then, a hero. He suffered that disappointment which we would
all have if we discovered that we were ourselves capable of those deeds
which we most admire in history and legend. This, then, was a hero.
After all, heroes were not much.

No, it could not be true. He was not a hero. Heroes had no shames in
their lives, and, as for him, he remembered borrowing fifteen dollars
from a friend and promising to pay it back the next day, and then
avoiding that friend for ten months. When at home his mother had aroused
him for the early labour of his life on the farm, it had often been his
fashion to be irritable, childish, diabolical; and his mother had died
since he had come to the war.

He saw that, in this matter of the well, the canteens, the shells, he
was an intruder in the land of fine deeds.

He was now about thirty paces from his comrades. The regiment had just
turned its many faces toward him.

From the forest of terrific noises there suddenly emerged a little
uneven line of men. They fired fiercely and rapidly at distant foliage
on which appeared little puffs of white smoke. The spatter of skirmish
firing was added to the thunder of the guns on the hill. The little line