The peasants who were streaming down the mountain trail had in their sharp terror evidently lost their ability to count. The cattle and the huge round bundles seemed to suffice to the minds of the crowd if there were now two in each case where there had been three. This brown stream poured on with a constant wastage of goods and beasts. A goat fell behind to the dried grass and its owner, howling, flogging his donkeys, passed far ahead. A colt, suddenly frightened, made a stumbling charge up the hill-side. The was always and always unnamed, unnoted. It was as if fear was a river, and this had simply been caught in the , man tumbling over beast, beast over man, as helpless in it as the logs that fall and shoulder grindingly through the of a country. It was a freshet that might sear the face of the tall quiet mountain; it might draw a livid line across the land, this downpour of fear with a thousand homes adrift in the current—men, women, babes, animals. From it there arose a constant of tongues, , broken, and sometimes choking as from men drowning. Many made gestures, painting their agonies on the air with fingers that twirled swiftly.  
The blue bay with its ships and the white town lay below them, distant, flat, . There was upon this a peace that a bird knows when high in the air it surveys the world, a great calm thing rolling noiselessly toward the end of the mystery. Here on the height one felt the existence of the universe scornfully defining the pain in ten thousand minds. The sky was an arch of . Even to the mountains raising their shapes from the valley, this headlong rush of the was too minute. The sea, the sky, and the hills combined in their to term this inconsequent. Then too it sometimes happened that a face seen as it passed on the flood reflected the spirit of them all and still more. One saw then a woman of the opinion of the above the clouds. When a child cried it cried always because of some adjacent misfortune, some of a pack-saddle or rudeness of an encircling arm. In the melody of this flight there were often sounding chords of . Into these , one felt that needles could be thrust without purchasing a scream. The trail wound here and there as the sheep had willed in the making of it.
 
Although this seemed to prove that the whole of humanity was fleeing in one direction—with every tie that us to the soil—a young man was walking rapidly up the mountain, hastening to a side of the path from time to time to avoid some particularly wide rush of people and cattle. He looked at everything in and pity. Frequently he called admonitions to fugitives, and at other moments he exchanged strange stares with the ones. They seemed to him to wear merely the expressions of so many rolling down the hill. He exhibited wonder and with his pitying glances.
 
Turning once toward the rear, he saw a man in the uniform of a of marching the same way. He waited then, elate at a of being able to make into words the emotion which heretofore had only been expressed in the flash of eyes and sensitive movements of his flexible mouth. He to the officer in rapid French, waving his arms wildly, and often pointing with a dramatic finger. "Ah, this is too cruel, too cruel, too cruel. Is it not? I did not think it would be as bad as this. I did not think—God's mercy—I did not think at all. And yet I am a Greek. Or at least my father was a Greek. I did not come here to fight. I am really a correspondent, you see? I was to write for an Italian paper. I have been educated in Italy. I have spent nearly all my life in Italy. At the schools and universities! I knew nothing of war! I was a student—a student. I came here merely because my father was a Greek, and for his sake I thought of Greece—I loved Greece. But I did not dream——"
 
 
He paused, breathing heavily. His eyes from that soft which comes on occasion to the glance of a young woman. Eager, , profoundly moved, his first words, while facing the procession of fugitives, had been an active definition of his own dimension, his personal relation to men, geography, life. Throughout he had preserved the dignity of a tragedian.
 
The officer's manner at once to this outburst. "Yes," he said, polite but mournful, "these poor people! These poor people! I do not know what is to become of these poor people."
 
The young man declaimed again. "I had no dream—I had no dream that it would be like this! This is too cruel! Too cruel! Now I want to be a soldier. Now I want to fight. Now I want to do battle for the land of my father." He made a gesture into the north-west.
 
The officer was also a young man, but he was very bronzed and steady. Above his high military collar of cloth with one silver star upon it, appeared a profile stern, quiet, and confident, respecting fate, fearing only opinion. His clothes were covered with dust; the only bright spot was the flame of the crimson collar. At the violent cries of his companion he smiled as if to himself, meanwhile keeping his eyes in a glance ahead.
 
From a land toward which their faces were came a continuous boom of fire. It was sounding in regular measures like the beating of a clock, a clock that was counting the seconds in the lives of the stars, and men had time to die between the ticks. Solemn, oracular, inexorable, the great seconds over the hills as if God fronted this dial by the horizon. The soldier and the correspondent found themselves silent. The latter in particular was sunk in a great mournfulness, as if he had resolved willy-nilly to swing to the bottom of the abyss where dwell secrets of his kind, and had learned beforehand that all to be met there was cruelty and hopelessness. A of his bright new leather leggings came unfastened, and he bowed over it slowly, impressively, as one bending over the grave of a child.
 
Then suddenly, the reverberations until one could not separate an explosion from another, and into the came the drawling sound of a musketry fire. Instantly, for some reason of , the noise was irritating, silly, infantile. This was childish. It forced the nerves to object, to protest against this racket which was as idle as the of a lad with a drum.
 
The lieutenant lifted his finger and pointed. He spoke in tones, as if he held the other man personally responsible for the noise. "Well, there!" he said. "If you wish for war you now have an opportunity magnificent."
 
The correspondent raised himself upon his toes. He tapped his chest with gloomy pride. "Yes! There is war! There is the war I wish to enter. I fling myself in. I am a Greek, a Greek, you understand. I wish to fight for my country. You know the way. Lead me. I offer myself." Struck by a sudden thought he brought a case from his pocket, and extracting a card handed it to the officer with a bow. "My name is Peza," he said simply.
 
A strange smile passed over the soldier's face. There was pity and pride—the vanity of experience—and contempt in it. "Very well," he said, returning the bow. "If my company is in the middle of the fight I shall be glad for the honour of your companionsh............