Posts Thirteen and Fifteen. The third made no sound before it
landed, except to an observer at a distance. Sergeant Walpole heard
neither the scream of fall nor the sound of its explosion.

* * * * *

He was running madly, and suddenly the earth bucked violently beneath
his feet, and he had a momentary sensation of things flying madly by
over his head, and then he knew nothing at all for a very long time.
Then his head ached horribly and someone was popping at something
valorously with a rifle, and he heard the nasty sharp explosions of the
hexynitrate bullets which have remodeled older ideas of warfare, and
Sergeant Walpole was aware of an urgent necessity to do something, but
he could not at all imagine what it was. Then a shell went off, the
earth-concussion banged his nose against the sand, and the rifle-fire
stopped.

"For Gawd's sake!" said Sergeant Walpole dizzily.

He staggered to his feet and looked behind him. Where the cottage had
been there was a hole. Quite a large hole. It was probably a hundred
yards across and all of twenty deep, but sea-water was seeping in to
fill it through the sand. Its edge was forty or fifty feet from where he
stood. He had been knocked down by the heaving earth, and the sand and
mud blown out of the crater had gone clean over him. Twenty feet back,
the top part of his body would have been cut neatly off by the blast. As
it was....

* * * * *

He found his nose bleeding and plugged it with his handkerchief. He was
still rather dazed, and he still had the feeling that there was
something extremely important that he must do. He stood rocking on his
feet, trying to clear his head, when two men came along the sand-dunes
behind the beach. One of them carried two automatic rifles. The other
was trying to bandage a limp and flapping arm as he ran. They saw the
Sergeant and ran to him.

"Hell, Sarge, I thought y'were blown to little egg-shells."

"I ain't," said Sergeant Walpole. He looked again at the hole in the
ground and swore painedly.

"Look at that," said the man with the flapping arm. "Hell's goin' to pop
around here, Sarge."

The sergeant swung around. Then his mouth dropped open. Just half a mile
away and hardly more than two hundred yards from the shore-line, the
Diesel tramp was ramming the beach. A wake still foamed behind it. A
monstrous bow-wave spread out on either hand, over-topping even the
comber