nd left with their
great flat wheels, camions began passing them returning from the
direction of the lines.

At last at a small red cross flag they stopped and ran the car into a
grove of tall chestnuts, where they parked it beside another car of
their section and lay down among the crisp leaves, listening to
occasional shells whining far overhead. All through the wood was a
continuous ping, pong, ping of batteries, with the crash of a big gun
coming now and then like the growl of a bull-frog among the sing-song of
small toads in a pond at night.

Through the trees from where they lay they could see the close-packed
wooden crosses of a cemetery from which came a sound of spaded earth,
and where, preceded by a priest in a muddy cassock, little two-wheeled
carts piled with shapeless things in sacks kept being brought up and
unloaded and dragged away again.

* * * * *

Showing alternately dark and light in the sun and shadow of the woodland
road, a cook waggon, short chimney giving out blue smoke, and cauldrons
steaming, clatters ahead of Martin and Randolph; the backs of two men in
heavy blue coats, their helmets showing above the narrow driver's seat.
On either side of the road short yellow flames keep spitting up,
slanting from hidden guns amid a pandemonium of noise.

Up the road a sudden column of black smoke rises among falling trees. A
louder explosion and the cook waggon in front of them vanishes in a new
whirl of thick smoke. Accelerator pressed down, the car plunges along
the rutted road, tips, and a wheel sinks in the new shell-hole. The hind
wheels spin for a moment, spattering gravel about, and just as another
roar comes behind them, bite into the road again and the car goes on,
speeding through the alternate sun and shadow of the woods. Martin
remembers the beating legs of a mule rolling on its back on the side of
the road and, steaming in the fresh morning air, the purple and yellow
and red of its ripped belly.

"Did you get the smell of almonds? I sort of like it," says Randolph,
drawing a long breath as the car slowed down again.

* * * * *

The woods at night, fantastic blackness full of noise and yellow leaping
flames from the mouths of guns. Now and then the sulphurous flash of a
shell explosion and the sound of trees falling and shell fragments
swishing through the air. At intervals over a little knoll in the
direction of the trenc