ds the little
broad shanty they used as a morgue.

* * * * *

Of the house, a little pale salmon-coloured villa, only a shell
remained, but the garden was quite untouched; fall roses and bunches of
white and pink and violet phlox bloomed there among the long grass and
the intruding nettles. In the centre the round concrete fountain was no
longer full of water, but a few brownish-green toads still inhabited it.
The place smelt of box and sweetbriar and yew, and when you lay down on
the grass where it grew short under the old yew tree by the fountain,
you could see nothing but placid sky and waving green leaves. Martin
Howe and Tom Randolph would spend there the quiet afternoons when they
were off duty, sleeping in the languid sunlight, or chatting lazily,
pointing out to each other tiny things, the pattern of snail-shells, the
glitter of insects' wings, colours, fragrances that made vivid for them
suddenly beauty and life, all that the shells that shrieked overhead, to
explode on the road behind them, threatened to wipe out.

One afternoon Russell joined them, a tall young man with thin face and
aquiline nose and unexpectedly light hair.

"Chef says we may go en repos in three days," he said, throwing himself
on the ground beside the other two.

"We've heard that before," said Tom Randolph. "Division hasn't started
out yet, ole boy; an' we're the last of the division."

"God, I'll be glad to go.... I'm dead," said Russell.

"I was up all last night with dysentery."

"So was I.... It was not funny; first it'd be vomiting, and then
diarrhoea, and then the shells'd start coming in. Gave me a merry time
of it."

"They say it's the gas," said Martin.

"God, the gas! Turns me sick to think of it," said Russell, stroking his
forehead with his hand. "Did I tell you about what happened to me the
night after the attack, up in the woods?"

"No."

"Well, I was bringing a load of wounded down from P.J. Right and I'd got
just beyond the corner where the little muddy hill is--you know, where
they're always shelling--when I found the road blocked. It was so
God-damned black you couldn't see your hand in front of you. A camion'd
gone off the road and another had run into it, and everything was
littered with boxes of shells spilt about."

"Must have been real nice," said Randolph.

"The devilish part of it was that I was all alone. Coney was too sick
with diarrhoea to be any use, so I left