with a whine of
fragments.

"A cook waggon got it!" the artilleryman shouted, dancing on. "Tra-la la
la-la-la-la, la-la la," he sang, snapping his fingers.

He stopped and spat again.

"What do I care?" he said. "Well, so long, old chap. I must go.... Say,
let's change knives--a little souvenir."

"Great."

"Good luck."

The artilleryman strode off through the woods, past the portable fence
that surrounded the huddled wooden crosses of the graveyard.

* * * * *

Against the red glare of the dawn the wilderness of shattered trees
stands out purple, hidden by grey mist in the hollows, looped and draped
fantastically with strands of telephone wire and barbed wire, tangled
like leafless creepers, that hang in clots against the red sky. Here and
there guns squat among piles of shells covered with mottled green
cheese-cloth, and spit long tongues of yellow flame against the sky. The
ambulance waits by the side of the rutted road littered with tin cans
and brass shell-cases, while a doctor and two stretcher-bearers bend
over a man on a stretcher laid among the underbrush. The man groans and
there is a sound of ripping bandages. On the other side of the road a
fallen mule feebly wags its head from side to side, a mass of purple
froth hanging from its mouth and wide-stretched scarlet nostrils.

There is a new smell in the wind, a smell unutterably sordid, like the
smell of the poor immigrants landing at Ellis Island. Martin Howe
glances round and sees advancing down the road ranks and ranks of
strange grey men whose mushroom-shaped helmets give an eerie look as of
men from the moon in a fairy tale.

"Why, they're Germans," he says to himself; "I'd quite forgotten they
existed."

"Ah, they're prisoners." The doctor gets to his feet and glances down
the road and then turns to his work again.

The tramp of feet marching in unison on the rough shell-pitted road, and
piles and piles of grey men clotted with dried mud, from whom comes the
new smell, the sordid, miserable smell of the enemy.

"Things going well?" Martin asks a guard, a man with ashen face and eyes
that burn out of black sockets.

"How should I know?"

"Many prisoners?"

"How should I know?"

* * * * *

The captain and the aumonier are taking their breakfast, each sitting on
a packing-box with their tin cups and tin plates ranged on the board
propped up between them. All round red cla