CHAPTER I

The brigade huddled about two fires in the half dawn, slowly finishing off a moldy breakfast, washing down crumbs of rotted bread with drafts of watery, synthetic tea. About them stood the stark skeletons of a forest, through the broken branches of which crept wraiths of mist, quiet as the ghosts of thirty million fighting men.

Half hidden by the persistent underbrush were several dark holes; down awry steps lay the abandoned depths of a once-great fortress, garrisoned now by skeletons which mildewed at their rusty guns.

Though not yet wholly awake, the attitudes of the men were alert through long practice. Each man with half himself was intent upon each slightest sound, not trusting the sentries who lay in fox holes round about. Much of this tautness was habit. But more of it, today, had direction. A night patrol had brought word that several hundred Russians occupied the ridges surrounding this place. And the brigade, which had once been six thousand strong, now numbered but a hundred and sixty-eight.

They were a motley command: Englishmen, Poles, Spaniards, Frenchmen, Finns and Italians, uniformed in the rags of twenty nations, friend and foe alike. They were armed with a catalogue of weapons, the cartridges of one seldom serving the rifle of another. They were clothed and armed, then, by the whim and experience of each.

In common they had endless years of war behind them. In common they had the habit of war. Long since the peasants of the armies had slid over the hill, back to devastated farms and fields, leaving only those who had but one talent.

The English could not, because of the quarantine against soldier's sickness, go home. Once they had had sweethearts, wives and families. But no one had heard for so long—

They had survived whole divisions of replacements. They had been commanded by more officers than they could count. They had been governed by more creeds than they could ever understand.

Here was their world, a shattered wood, an empty fortress, a breakfast of crumbs and hot water, each man hard by his rifle, each existing for the instant and expecting the next to bring danger and death.

These were the unkillables, immune to bullets, bombs and bugs, schooled in war to perfection, kept alive by a seventh and an eighth sense of danger which could interpret the slightest change in their surroundings 

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