When he saw Dellarme's still body he dismounted and in a tide of feeling which, for the moment, submerged all thought of the machine, stood, head bowed and cap off, looking down at Dellarme's face.
"I was very fond of him! He was at the school when I was teaching there. But a good death—a soldier's death!" he said. "I'll write to his mother myself." Then the voice of the machine spoke. "Who is in command?"
"I am, sir!" said the callow lieutenant, coming up.
Feller's fingers moved in a restless beat on his trousers' seam, his lips half parted as if he must speak, but the men of the company spoke for him.
"Bert Stransky!" they roared.
It was not according to military etiquette, but military etiquette meant nothing to them now. They were above it in veteran superiority.
"And—" Stransky had started to point to Feller, whose name he did not know, when a forbidding gleam under the hat brim arrested him.
"Where's Stransky?" demanded the staff-officer.
"You're looking at him!" replied Stransky with a benign grin.
Seeing that Stransky was only a private, the officer frowned at the anomaly when a lieutenant was present, then smiled in a way that accorded the company parliamentary rights, which he thought that they had fully earned.