These lesser minds are to our stronger minds as filings to the magnet. We call and they come though no word is spoken and our command may only be expressed in a great longing.
So Pep galloped and galloped and knew not why, only something was calling and calling and he could but obey. He did not need a map or a compass. His dog instinct supplied both.
The reason for his galloping was this. His master, who was also his god, lay in a narrow gulch at the edge of the Argonne forest, close to a little brook in a poplar thicket, shot through the hips and nearly dead from thirst and loss of blood.
CHAPTER V
THE BATTLEFIELD
SO fast do events move at the front, with the wonderfully organized war machine, that six hours after the doctor’s unit finally detrained at a little station somewhere in France, near the Argonne forest, they found themselves closely following up an American regiment. The regiment was engaged in that most nerve-racking and hazardous undertaking of routing out machine-gun nests in a heavily wooded sector.
Even before they left the train they could hear the continuous cannonading away to the northeast. It was like the constant rolling of heaviest thunder dotted with many quick staccato explosions. The fire from the heavy artillery was also visible along the horizon.
At first they went forward through open country, undulating and broken, but soon entered intermittent woods, with deep ravines and sharp ridges, just the sort of country for hard fighting.
Much of this region was so rough that the ambulances could not penetrate it, and the wounded had to be brought out for leagues on stretchers; but most of them lay where they fell and the surgeons and Red Cross men gave them first aid there, and trusted to luck to get them out later.