ind out of
you."

"Say, Randolph, have you heard the new orders?"

"No."

A tall, fair-haired man came out from the front of his car where he had
been working on the motor, holding his grease-covered hands away from
him.

"It's put off," he said, lowering his voice mysteriously. "D.J.'s not
till day after to-morrow at four-twenty. But to-morrow we're going up to
relieve the section that's coming out and take over the posts. They say
it's hell up there. The Germans have a new gas that you can't smell at
all. The other section's got about five men gassed, and a bunch of them
have broken down. The posts are shelled all the time."

"Great," said Tom Randolph. "We'll see the real thing this time."

There was a whistling shriek overhead and all three of them fell in a
heap on the ground in front of the car. There was a crash that echoed
amid the house-walls, and a pillar of black smoke stood like a cypress
tree at the other end of the village street.

"Talk about the real thing!" said Martin.

"Ole 410 evidently woke 'em up some."

* * * * *

It was the fifth time that day that Martin's car had passed the
cross-roads where the calvary was. Someone had propped up the fallen
crucifix so that it tilted dark despairing arms against the sunset sky
where the sun gleamed like a huge copper kettle lost in its own steam.
The rain made bright yellowish stripes across the sky and dripped from
the cracked feet of the old wooden Christ, whose gaunt, scarred figure
hung out from the tilted cross, swaying a little under the beating of
the rain. Martin was wiping the mud from his hands after changing a
wheel. He stared curiously at the fallen jowl and the cavernous eyes
that had meant for some country sculptor ages ago the utterest agony of
pain. Suddenly he noticed that where the crown of thorns had been about
the forehead of the Christ someone had wound barbed wire. He smiled, and
asked the swaying figure in his mind:

"And You, what do You think of it?"

For an instant he could feel wire barbs ripping through his own flesh.

He leaned over to crank the car.

The road was filled suddenly with the tramp and splash of troops
marching, their wet helmets and their rifles gleaming in the coppery
sunset. Even through the clean rain came the smell of filth and sweat
and misery of troops marching. The faces under the helmets were strained
and colourless and cadaverous from the weight of the equipmen