ed up.
God, I'll never forget these chaps' shoutin', 'Here's a feller come to
die with us.'"

"Whew! That's some story," said Randolph.

"That'll make a letter home, won't it?" said Russell, smiling. "Guess my
girl'll think I'm heroic enough after that."

Martin's eyes were watching a big dragonfly with brown body and cream
and rainbow wings that hovered over the empty fountain and the three
boys stretched on the grass, and was gone against the azure sky.

* * * * *

The prisoner had grey flesh, so grimed with mud that you could not tell
if he were young or old. His uniform hung in a formless clot of mud
about a slender frame. They had treated him at the dressing-station for
a gash in his upper arm, and he was being used to help the
stretcher-bearers. Martin sat in the front seat of the ambulance,
watching him listlessly as he walked down the rutted road under the torn
shreds of camouflage that fluttered a little in the wind. Martin
wondered what he was thinking. Did he accept all this stench and filth
and degradation of slavery as part of the divine order of things? Or did
he too burn with loathing and revolt?

And all those men beyond the hill and the wood, what were they thinking?
But how could they think? The lies they were drunk on would keep them
eternally from thinking. They had never had any chance to think until
they were hurried into the jaws of it, where was no room but for
laughter and misery and the smell of blood.

The rutted road was empty now. Most of the batteries were quiet.
Overhead in the brilliant sky aeroplanes snored monotonously.

The woods all about him were a vast rubbish-heap; the jagged, splintered
boles of leafless trees rose in every direction from heaps of brass
shell-cases, of tin cans, of bits of uniform and equipment. The wind
came in puffs laden with an odour as of dead rats in an attic. And this
was what all the centuries of civilisation had struggled for. For this
had generations worn away their lives in mines and factories and forges,
in fields and workshops, toiling, screwing higher and higher the tension
of their minds and muscles, polishing brighter and brighter the mirror
of their intelligence. For this!

The German prisoner and another man had appeared in the road again,
carrying a stretcher between them, walking with the slow, meticulous
steps of great fatigue. A series of shells came in, like three cracks of
a whip along the road. Mar