ards
away, and their guns were busy in the night, so that the shells came
overhead, and lads who had heard the owls hoot in English woods now
heard stranger night-birds crying through the air, with the noise of
rushing wings, ending in a thunderclap.

"And my old mother thinks I'm enjoying myself!" said the heir to a
seaside lodging-house.

"Thirsty work, this grave-digging job," said a lad who used to skate on
rollers between the bath-chairs of Brighton promenade.

"Can't see much in those shells," said a young man who once sold ladies'
blouses in an emporium of a south coast village. "How those newspaper
chaps do try to frighten us!"

He put his head on one side with a sudden jerk.

"What's that? Wasps?"

A number of insects were flying overhead with a queer, sibilant noise.
Somewhere in the darkness there was a steady rattle in the throat of a
beast.

"What's that, Sergeant?"

"Machine-gums, my child. Keep your head down, or you'll lose hold of
it... Steady, there. Don't get jumpy, now!"

The machine-gun was firing too high to do any serious damage. It was
probably a ricochet from a broken tree which made one of the boys
suddenly drop his spade and fall over it in a crumpled way.

"Get up, Charlie," said the comrade next to him; and then, in a scared
voice, "Oh, Sergeant!"

"That's all right," said the sergeant-major. "We're getting off very
lightly. New remember what I've been telling you... Stretcher this way."

They were very steady through the night, this first company of the New
Army.

"Like old soldiers, sir," said the sergeant-major, when he stood
chatting with the colonel after breakfast.

It was a bit of bad luck, though not very bad, after all--which made the
Germans shell a hamlet into which I went just as some of the New Army
were marching through to their quarters. These men had already seen
what shellfire could do to knock the beauty out of old houses and quiet
streets. They had gone tramping through one or two villages to which
the enemy's guns had turned their attention, and had received that
unforgetable sensation of one's first sight of roofless cottages, and
great gaps in garden walls, and tall houses which have tumbled inside
themselves. But now they saw this destruction in the process, and stood
very still, listening to the infernal clatter as shells burst at the
other end of the street, tumbling down huge masses of masonry and
plugging holes into neat cottages, and tearing gre