on tip-toe on the top step and peered about in every direction with an air of ownership, then sat down again and began talking briskly.

[33]

"We are exactly four hundred and five mètres from the Boche.... Five hundred mètres from here they are drinking beer and saying, 'Hoch der Kaiser.'"

"About as much as we're saying 'Vive la République,' I should say."

"Who knows? But it is quiet here, isn't it? It's quieter here than in Paris."

"The sky is very beautiful to-night."

"They say they're shelling the Etat-Major to-day. Damned embusqués; it'll do them good to get a bit of their own medicine."

Martin did not answer. He was crossing in his mind the four hundred and five mètres to the first Boche listening-post. Next beyond the abris was the latrine from which a puff of wind brought now and then a nauseous stench. Then there was the tin roof, crumpled as if by a hand, that had been a cook shack. That was just behind the second line trenches that zig-zagged in and out of great abscesses of wet, upturned clay along the crest of a little hill. The other day he had been there, and had clambered up the oily clay where the boyau had caved in, and from the level of the ground had looked for an anxious minute or two at the tangle of trenches and pitted gangrened soil in the direction of the German outposts. And all along these random gashes in the mucky clay were men, feet and legs huge from clotting after clotting of clay, men [34]with greyish-green faces scarred by lines of strain and fear and boredom as the hillside was scarred out of all semblance by the trenches and the shell-holes.

[34]

"We are well off here," said the doctor again. "I have not had a serious case all day."

"Up in the front line there's a place where they've planted rhubarb.... You know, where the hillside is beginning to get rocky."

"It was the Boche who did that.... We took that slope from them two months ago.... How does it grow?"

"They say the gas makes the leaves shrivel," said Martin, laughing.

He looked long at the little ranks of clouds that had begun to fill the sky, like ruffles on a woman's dress. Might not it really be, he kept asking 

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