d querulously.

"There's plenty fear that," admitted Halliday, "before their first
action; but mostly it passes the second they leave cover and can't
protect themselves and have to trust to whatever there is outside,
themselves to bring them through. You don't know the beginning of how
bad the fear o' fear can be till you have seen dozens of your mates
killed, till you've had death no more than touch you scores of times,
like I have."

"But you don't mean to tell me," said Toffee incredulously, "that you
are afraid of yourself, that you can't trust yourself now? Why, I've
heard said often that you're one of the coolest under fire, and that
you don't know what fear is!"

"It's a good reputation to have if you can keep it," said Halliday.
"But it makes it worse if you can't."

"I wish," said Toffee enviously, "I was as sure of keeping it as you
are to-day."

Halliday pulled his hand from his pocket and held it beside him where
only Toffee could see it. It was quivering like a flag-halliard in a
stiff breeze. He thrust it back in his pocket.

"Doesn't look too sure, does it?" he said grimly. "And my heart is
shaking a sight worse than my hand."

He was interrupted by the arrival of a group of German shells on and
about the section of trench they were in. One burst on the rear lip of
the trench, spattering earth and bullets about them and leaving a
choking reek swirling and eddying along the trench. There was silence
for an instant, and then an officer's voice called from the near
traverse. "Is anybody hit there!" A sergeant shouted back "No, sir,"
and was immediately remonstrated with by an indignant private busily
engaged in scraping the remains of a mud clod from his eye.

"You might wait a minute, Sergeant," he said, "afore you reports no
casualties, just to give us time to look round and count if all our
limbs is left on. And I've serious doubts at this minute whether my eye
is in its right place or bulging out the back o' my head; anyway, it
feels as if an eight-inch Krupp had bumped fair into it."

When the explosion came, Toffee Everton had instinctively ducked and
crouched, but he noticed that Halliday never moved or gave a sign of
the nearness of any danger. Toffee remarked this to him.

"And I don't see," he confessed, "where that fits in with this
hand- and heart-shaking o' yours."

Halliday looked at him curiously.

"If that was the worst," he said, "I could stand it. It isn't. It isn't
the begi