t on their
necks and their backs and their thighs. The faces drooped under the
helmets, tilted to one side or the other, distorted and wooden like the
face of the figure that dangled from the cross.

Above the splash of feet through mud and the jingle of equipment, came
occasionally the ping, ping of shrapnel bursting at the next cross-roads
at the edge of the woods.

Martin sat in the car with the motor racing, waiting for the end of the
column.

One of the stragglers who floundered along through the churned mud of
the road after the regular ranks had passed stopped still and looked up
at the tilted cross. From the next cross-roads came, at intervals, the
sharp twanging ping of shrapnel bursting.

The straggler suddenly began kicking feebly at the prop of the cross
with his foot, and then dragged himself off after the column. The cross
fell forward with a dull splintering splash into the mud of the road.

* * * * *

The road went down the hill in long zig-zags, through a village at the
bottom where out of the mist that steamed from the little river a spire
with a bent weathercock rose above the broken roof of the church, then
up the hill again into the woods. In the woods the road stretched green
and gold in the first horizontal sunlight. Among the thick trees, roofs
covered with branches, were rows of long portable barracks with doors
decorated with rustic work. At one place a sign announced in letters
made of wattled sticks, _Camp des Pommiers_.

A few birds sang in the woods, and at a pump they passed a lot of men
stripped to the waist who were leaning over washing, laughing and
splashing in the sunlight. Every now and then, distant, metallic, the
pong, pong, pong of a battery of seventy-fives resounded through the
rustling trees.

"Looks like a camp meetin' ground in Georgia," said Tom Randolph,
blowing his whistle to make two men carrying a large steaming pot on a
pole between them get out of the way.

The road became muddier as they went deeper into the woods, and, turning
into a cross-road, the car began slithering, skidding a little at the
turns, through thick soupy mud. On either side the woods became broken
and jagged, stumps and split boughs littering the ground, trees snapped
off halfway up. In the air there was a scent of newly-split timber and
of turned-up woodland earth, and among them a sweetish rough smell.

Covered with greenish mud, splashing the mud right a