use even in removing the piece of shell. The
clergyman came to him and spoke to him for some time, and told him
that there was no hope of recovery for him. He seemed to get tired of
his ministrations, and asked them to "send down for my chum." When
this chum arrived he was unable to speak, but just pressed his hand
and smiled, and went off into his death-sleep.

A boy, who could not have been more than seventeen or eighteen, was
lying on the side of the hill with his head on a flat stone. He had
been hit by a piece of shell, and both his legs were broken and
mangled above the knee. He was done for, and his life was only a
matter of lasting some minutes. Another man, wounded somewhere
internally, was lying beside him. There was no sign of pain on the
boy's face; his eyes were closed. He just seemed very tired. Opening
his eyes, he looked downwards intently at his legs, which were lying
at an oblique angle with his body, from where they had been hit. It
looked as if his trousers were the only attachment. As he gazed
intently, a troubled look came over his face, and his wounded comrade
beside him was watching him and saw it. The tired eyes closed again
wearily, and then the wounded man alongside him, cursing with
variegated and rich vocabulary, bent, or half rolled over, and caught
first one boot and then the other, and lifted each leg straight down,
swearing under his breath the while. Then he lay back, swearing at the
blankety blank young blanker, and still watching him. Soon the tired
eyes opened again, and instinctively looked down at his legs. They
seemed to open wider as he looked; then he smiled faintly, thinking he
had been mistaken about them before, and lay back, and the eyes did
not open any more. The fellow beside him chuckled and said to himself,
"Well, I'm damned!" but possibly the Recording Angel has put down a
mark that may help to prevent it.

Times are changed from ages past; there is no longer the mighty "shock
of arms," the pomp and panoply of glorious war. Men fall to the shrill
whisper of a bullet, the sound of which has not time to reach their
ears, fired by an invisible foe. Their death is merely the _quod erat
demonstrandum_ of a mathematical and mechanical proposition. But with
bow and arrow, spear or battle-axe, Mauser or Lee-Metford, the heart
behind the weapon is just the same now as then. Probably faint hearts
fail now as then, just as much--shrink to a panic that falls on them
suddenly as