ammunition
dump."

"Is the car hit?" The orderly came up to them.

"Don't think so."

"Good. Four stretcher-cases for 42 at once."

* * * * *

At night in a dugout. Five men playing cards about a lamp-flame that
blows from one side to the other in the gusty wind that puffs every now
and then down the mouth of the dugout and whirls round it like something
alive trying to beat a way out.

Each time the lamp blows the shadows of the five heads writhe upon the
corrugated tin ceiling. In the distance, like kettle-drums beaten for a
dance, a constant reverberation of guns.

Martin Howe, stretched out in the straw of one of the bunks, watches
their faces in the flickering shadows. He wishes he had the patience to
play too. No, perhaps it is better to look on; it would be so silly to
be killed in the middle of one of those grand gestures one makes in
slamming the card down that takes the trick. Suddenly he thinks of all
the lives that must, in these last three years, have ended in that grand
gesture. It is too silly. He seems to see their poor lacerated souls,
clutching their greasy dog-eared cards, climb to a squalid Valhalla, and
there, in tobacco-stinking, sweat-stinking rooms, like those of the
little cafes behind the lines, sit in groups of five, shuffling,
dealing, taking tricks, always with the same slam of the cards on the
table, pausing now and then to scratch their louse-eaten flesh.

At this moment, how many men, in all the long Golgotha that stretches
from Belfort to the sea, must be trying to cheat their boredom and their
misery with that grand gesture of slamming the cards down to take a
trick, while in their ears, like tom-toms, pounds the death-dance of the
guns.

Martin lies on his back looking up at the curved corrugated ceiling of
the dugout, where the shadows of the five heads writhe in fantastic
shapes. Is it death they are playing, that they are so merry when they
take a trick?

CHAPTER V

The three planes gleamed like mica in the intense blue of the sky. Round
about the shrapnel burst in little puffs like cotton-wool. A shout went
up from the soldiers who stood in groups in the street of the ruined
town. A whistle split the air, followed by a rending snort that tailed
off into the moaning of a wounded man.

"By damn, they're nervy. They dropped a bomb."

"I should say they did."

"The dirty bastards, to get a fellow who's going on permission. Now i