"Gee, that was in the house behind us...." "I smell gas." "Ye damn fool, it's carbide." "One of the Frenchmen said it was gas." "All right, fellers, put on your masks." Outside there was a sickly rough smell in the air that mingled strangely with the perfume of the cool night, musical with the gurgling of the stream through the little valley where their barn was. They crouched in a quarry by the roadside, a straggling, half-naked group, and watched the flashes in the sky northward, where artillery along the [32]lines kept up a continuous hammering drumbeat. Over their heads shells shrieked at two-minute intervals, to explode with a rattling ripping sound in the village on the other side of the valley. [32] "Damn foolishness," muttered Tom Randolph in his rich Southern voice. "Why don't those damn gunners go to sleep and let us go to sleep?... They must be tired like we are." A shell burst in a house on the crest of the hill opposite, so that they saw the flash against the starry night sky. In the silence that followed, the moaning shriek of a man came faintly across the valley. Martin sat on the steps of the dugout, looking up the shattered shaft of a tree, from the top of which a few ribbons of bark fluttered against the mauve evening sky. In the quiet he could hear the voices of men chatting in the dark below him, and a sound of someone whistling as he worked. Now and then, like some ungainly bird, a high calibre shell trundled through the air overhead; after its noise had completely died away would come the thud of the explosion. It was like battledore and shuttlecock, these huge masses whirling through the evening far above his head, now from one side, now from the other. It gave him somehow a cosy feeling of safety, as if he were under some sort of a bridge over which freight-cars were shunted madly to and fro. The doctor in charge of the post came up and sat beside Martin. He was a small brown [33]man with slim black moustaches that curved like the horns of a long-horn steer. He stood
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