another shell
burst while he was looking, driving him into a panic so acute that
Hastings began to swear.

Toward midday the wind fell and the heat became intense. Smoke, acrid
and at times stifling, hung in the hollows like white- and
brown-streaked palls, and the unwholesome smell of burning which infests
battlefields was sickening. Jeb's clothes were wringing wet, and each
time he panted across the first trench bridge he noted how the waiting
men under steel helmets were drenched with perspiration. One of them
called up to him:

"It's our turn next!--keep an eye open for me!"

The fellow was trying to grin, but succeeded only in making an ugly
leer. Jeb read it in a flash--the man was afraid!--and a stinging sense
of mortification came over him as he wondered if his own face had been
as tell-tale--if it were now as tell-tale!

Over on the battle front, and especially around the half-destroyed
hamlet, the Germans were contesting every foot that led to their third
line of defense, while the Allies fought with stark madness to dislodge
them. The airmen hovering above, having for the third time that day
swept the sky of combatants, saw with surprise that armies on both sides
were losing cohesion. Some units of the Allies had lost direction,
others bored their way through the German line then, finding themselves
hemmed in, fought out again; in many places were noticed small groups so
intent upon their own little conflicts that they seemed to be having no
part in the big game, at all. But these aerial observers realized that
the tremendous sledge-hammer blows, directed with consummate skill and
resiliency, left the mass of wastage on the German side; for, with
strategical and tactical problems suddenly changed from boxed-in trench
warfare to the elastic manoeuvers of open battle, the directing mind
which is more elastic, all things else being equal, wins the day--and,
whatever other virtues the Boche may possess, his mind can hardly be
said to expand spontaneously. At the same time, the enemy was dying
hard: fortifying at a moment's notice when forced into a corner, and
making heroic resistance with machine-guns in patches of woods, craters,
or other favorable moulding of the terrain.

When Jeb sweated in behind Hastings at one o'clock he staggered down the
road without seeing it. From lack of food, and the horrible wrenching
nausea he had suffered, as well as the terror gnawing more and more
into his soul, he was pr