emotion that fluttered in his throat. At the last words he faced about
abruptly and without looking around tossed the final command over his
shoulder for the men to deploy, and with his head sunk upon his chest he
began the ascent, taking long strides. Behind him boots crunched and
food pails clattered against some other part of the men's accouterment.
Soon, too, there came the sound of the gasping of heavily laden men; and
a thick, suffocating smell of sweat settled upon the marching company.

Captain Marschner was ashamed. A real physical nausea at the part he had
just played overcame him. What was there left for these simple people to
do, these bricklayers and engineers and cultivators of the earth, who,
bent over their daily tasks, had lived without vision into the future--
what was there left for them to do when the grand folks, the learned
people, their own captain with the three golden stars on his collar,
assured them it was their duty and a most praiseworthy thing to shoot
Italian bricklayers and engineers and farmers into fragments? They went
--gasping behind him, and he--he led them on! Led them, against his inner
conviction, because of his pitiful cowardice, and asked them to be
courageous and contemptuous of death. He had talked them into it, had
abused their confidence, had made capital of their love for their wives
and children, because if he acted in the service of a lie, there was a
chance of his continuing to live and even coming back home safe again,
while if he stuck to the truth he believed in there was the certainty of
his being stood up against a wall and shot.

He staked their lives and his own life on the throw of loaded dice
because he was too cowardly to contemplate the certain loss of the game
for himself alone.

The sun beat down murderously on the steep, treeless declivity. The