the position that is
the most comfortable. He was trying to roll over on his back.

But the pack was on his back and every time he would roll over on this
it would elevate his body into full view of the German gunners. Then a
withering hail of lead would sweep the field. It so happened that I was
lying immediately in line between those German guns and this unconscious
moving target. As the Marine would roll over on top of the pack his
chest would be exposed to the fire.

I could see the buttons fly from his tunic and one of the shoulder
straps of the back pack part as the sprays of lead struck him. He would
limply roll off the pack over on his side. I found myself wishing that
he would lie still, as every movement of his brought those streams of
bullets closer and closer to my head. I even considered the thickness of
the box respirator on which I had elevated my head off the ground. It
was about two inches thick.

I remembered my French gas mask hanging from my shoulder and recalled
immediately that it was much flatter, being hardly half an inch in
thickness. I forthwith drew up the French mask to my head, extracted the
British one and rested my cheek closer to the ground on the French one.
Thus, I lowered my head about an inch and a half--an inch and a half
that represented worlds of satisfaction and some optimism to me.

Sometimes there were lulls in the firing. During those periods of
comparative quiet, I could hear the occasional moan of other wounded on
that field. Very few of them cried out and it seemed to me that those
who did were unconscious when they did it. One man in particular had a
long, low groan. I could not see him, yet I felt he was lying somewhere
close to me. In the quiet intervals, his unconscious expression of pain
reminded me of the sound I had once heard made by a calf which had been
tied by a short rope to a tree. The animal had strayed round and round
the tree until its entanglements in the rope had left it a helpless
prisoner. The groan of that unseen, unconscious wounded American who
laid near me on the field that evening sounded exactly like the pitiful
bawl of that calf.

Those three hours were long in passing. With the successive volleys that
swept the field, I sometimes lost hope that I could ever survive it. It
seemed to me that if three German bullets had found me within the space
of fifteen minutes, I could hardly expect to spend three hours without
receiving the fatal one. With