"I can keep up! I can keep up! I feel like a boy!"
"But it is different these days, and this is the infantry. The bullets carry far. You will not know how to take cover," the colonel explained.
"Well, if I am killed I won't be losing much time on this earth," grandfather observed with cool logic. "But that ain't it. I'm worried about Tom. I'm afraid he ain't going to fight! I—I want to stiffen him up!"
"He will fight, all right. Sorry, but it is out of the question," said the colonel, turning away.
Grandfather buried his face in his hands and shook with the sobs of second childhood until an idea occurred to him. Wasn't he a free man? Hadn't he as much right as anybody to use the public highway? Drying his eyes, he set out along the road in the wake of the regiment.
One company after another left the road at a given point, bound for the position mapped in its instructions Dellarme's, however, went on until it was opposite the Galland house.
"We are depending on you," the colonel said to Dellarme, giving his hand a grip. "You are not to draw off till you get the flag."
"No, sir," Dellarme replied.
"Mind the signal to the batteries—keep the men screened—warn them not to let their first baptism of shell fire shake their nerves!" the colonel added in a final repetition of instructions already indelibly impressed on the captain's mind.
Moving cautiously through a cut, Dellarme's company came, about midnight, to a halt among the stubble of a wheat-field behind a knoll. After he had bidden the men to break ranks, he crept up the incline.