to keep the limp leg from bouncing. The smell of
blood and filth is misery in his nostrils.

"Softly.... Softly.... Oh--oh--oh!" The groan is barely heard amid the
bubbling breath.

Pitch dark in the car. Martin, his every muscle taut with the agony of
the man's pain, is on his knees, pressing his chest on the man's chest,
trying with an arm stretched along the man's leg to keep him from
bouncing in the broken stretcher.

"Needn't have troubled to have brought him," said the hospital orderly,
as blood dripped fast from the stretcher, black in the light of the
lantern. "He's pretty near dead now. He won't last long."

CHAPTER VII

"So you like it, Will? You like this sort of thing?"

Martin Howe was stretched on the grass of a hillside a little above a
cross-roads. Beside him squatted a ruddy-faced youth with a smudge of
grease on his faintly-hooked nose. A champagne bottle rested against his
knees.

"Yes. I've never been happier in my life. It's a coarse boozing sort of
a life, but I like it."

They looked over the landscape of greyish rolling hills scarred
everywhere by new roads and ranks of wooden shacks. Along the road
beneath them crawled like beetles convoy after convoy of motor-trucks.
The wind came to them full of a stench of latrines and of the exhaust of
motors.

"The last time I saw you," said Martin, after a pause, "was early one
morning on the Cambridge bridge. I was walking out from Boston, and we
talked of the Eroica they'd played at the Symphony, and you said it was
silly to have a great musician try to play soldier. D'you remember?"

"No. That was in another incarnation. Have some fizz."

He poured from the bottle into a battered tin cup.

"But talking about playing soldier, Howe, I must tell you about how our
lieutenant got the Croix de Guerre.... Somebody ought to write a book
called _Heroisms of the Great War_...."

"I am sure that many people have, and will. You probably'll do it
yourself, Will. But go on."

The sun burst from the huddled clouds for a moment, mottling the hills
and the scarred valleys with light. The shadow of an aeroplane flying
low passed across the field, and the snoring of its motors cut out all
other sound.

"Well, our louie's name's Duval, but he spells it with a small 'd' and a
big 'V.' He's been wanting a Croix de Guerre for a hell of a time
because lots of fellows in the section have been getting 'em. He tried
giving dinners to the General Staff