right, fellers, put on your masks."

Outside there was a sickly rough smell in the air that mingled strangely
with the perfume of the cool night, musical with the gurgling of the
stream through the little valley where their barn was. They crouched in
a quarry by the roadside, a straggling, half-naked group, and watched
the flashes in the sky northward, where artillery along the lines kept
up a continuous hammering drumbeat. Over their heads shells shrieked at
two-minute intervals, to explode with a rattling ripping sound in the
village on the other side of the valley.

"Damn foolishness," muttered Tom Randolph in his rich Southern voice.
"Why don't those damn gunners go to sleep and let us go to sleep?...
They must be tired like we are."

A shell burst in a house on the crest of the hill opposite, so that they
saw the flash against the starry night sky. In the silence that
followed, the moaning shriek of a man came faintly across the valley.

* * * * *

Martin sat on the steps of the dugout, looking up the shattered shaft of
a tree, from the top of which a few ribbons of bark fluttered against
the mauve evening sky. In the quiet he could hear the voices of men
chatting in the dark below him, and a sound of someone whistling as he
worked. Now and then, like some ungainly bird, a high calibre shell
trundled through the air overhead; after its noise had completely died
away would come the thud of the explosion. It was like battledore and
shuttlecock, these huge masses whirling through the evening far above
his head, now from one side, now from the other. It gave him somehow a
cosy feeling of safety, as if he were under some sort of a bridge over
which freight-cars were shunted madly to and fro.

The doctor in charge of the post came up and sat beside Martin. He was a
small brown man with slim black moustaches that curved like the horns of
a long-horn steer. He stood on tip-toe on the top step and peered about
in every direction with an air of ownership, then sat down again and
began talking briskly.

"We are exactly four hundred and five metres from the Boche.... Five
hundred metres from here they are drinking beer and saying, 'Hoch der
Kaiser.'"

"About as much as we're saying 'Vive la Republique', I should say."

"Who knows? But it is quiet here, isn't it? It's quieter here than in
Paris."

"The sky is very beautiful to-night."

"They say they're shelling the Etat-Major to-day.