tin followed the stretcher-bearers into the
dugout.

The prisoner wiped the sweat from his grime-streaked forehead, and
started up the step of the dugout again, a closed stretcher on his
shoulder. Something made Martin look after him as he strolled down the
rutted road. He wished he knew German so that he might call after the
man and ask him what manner of a man he was.

Again, like snapping of a whip, three shells flashed yellow as they
exploded in the brilliant sunlight of the road. The slender figure of
the prisoner bent suddenly double, like a pocket-knife closing, and lay
still. Martin ran out, stumbling in the hard ruts. In a soft child's
voice the prisoner was babbling endlessly, contentedly. Martin kneeled
beside him and tried to lift him, clasping him round the chest under the
arms. He was very hard to lift, for his legs dragged limply in their
soaked trousers, where the blood was beginning to saturate the muddy
cloth, stickily. Sweat dripped from Martin's face, on the man's face,
and he felt the arm-muscles and the ribs pressed against his body as he
clutched the wounded man tightly to him in the effort of carrying him
towards the dugout. The effort gave Martin a strange contentment. It was
as if his body were taking part in the agony of this man's body. At last
they were washed out, all the hatreds, all the lies, in blood and sweat.
Nothing was left but the quiet friendliness of beings alike in every
part, eternally alike.

Two men with a stretcher came from the dugout, and Martin laid the man's
body, fast growing limper, less animated, down very carefully.

As he stood by the car, wiping the blood off his hands with an oily rag,
he could still feel the man's ribs and the muscles of the man's arm
against his side. It made him strangely happy.

* * * * *

At the end of the dugout a man was drawing short, hard breath as if he'd
been running. There was the accustomed smell of blood and chloride and
bandages and filthy miserable flesh. Howe lay on a stretcher wrapped in
his blanket, with his coat over him, trying to sleep. There was very
little light from a smoky lamp down at the end where the wounded were.
The French batteries were fairly quiet, but the German shells were
combing through the woods, coming in series of three and four, gradually
nearing the dugout and edging away again. Howe saw the woods as a
gambling table on which, throw after throw, scattered the random dic