bit of anger
and surprise in his voice. "How the hell can you be all right if you are
hit in the head? Are you bleeding much?"

"No," I said. "What time is it, will you tell me?"

"I'm coming over to get you," shouted Hartzell.

"Don't move, you damn fool, you want to kill both of us?" I hastened to
shout back. "If you start moving, don't move near me. I think they think
I'm dead."

"Well you can't lie there and bleed to death," Hartzell replied. "We've
got to do something to get to hell out of here. What'll we do?"

"Tell me what time it is and how long it will be before it's dark," I
asked.

"It's six o'clock now," Hartzell said, "and it won't be dark 'til nine;
this is June. Do you think you can stick it out?"

I told him that I thought I could and we were silent for some time. Both
of us had the feeling that other ears--ears working in conjunction with
eyes trained along the barrels of those machine guns a hundred yards on
our left--would be aroused to better marksmanship if we continued to
talk.

I began to take stock of my condition. During my year or more along the
fronts I had been through many hospitals and from my observations in
those institutions I had cultivated a keen distaste for one thing--gas
gangrene. I had learned from doctors its fatal and horrible results and
I also had learned from them that it was caused by germs which exist in
large quantities in any ground that has been under artificial
cultivation for a long period.

Such was the character of the very field I was lying in and I came to
the realisation that the wound in the left side of my face and head was
resting flatly on the soil. With my right hand I drew up my British box
respirator or gas mask and placed this under my head. Thus I rested with
more confidence, although the machine gun lead continued to pass in
sheets through the tops of the oats not two or three inches above my
head.

All of it was coming from the left,--coming from the German nests
located in the trees at the apex of the V-shaped field. Those guns were
not a hundred yards away and they seemed to have an inexhaustible supply
of ammunition. Twenty feet away on my left a wounded Marine was lying.
Occasionally I would open my right eye for a painful look in his
direction.

He was wounded and apparently unconscious. His pack, "the khaki doll,"
was still strapped between his shoulders. Unconsciously he was doing
that which all wounded men do--that is, to assume