and came Doggie with his draft, still
half stupefied by the remorselessness of the stupendous machine in
which he had been caught, in spite of his many months of training in
England. He had loathed the East Coast camp. When he landed at
Boulogne in the dark and the pouring rain and hunched his pack with
the others who went off singing to the rest camp, he regretted East
Anglia.

"Give us a turn on the whistle, Doggie," said a corporal.

"I was sea-sick into it and threw it overboard," he growled, stumbling
over the rails of the quay.

"Oh, you holy young liar!" said the man next him.

But Doggie did not trouble to reply, his neighbour being only a
private like himself.

Then the draft joined its unit. In his youth Doggie had often wondered
at the meaning of the familiar inscription on every goods van in
France: "40 Hommes. 8 Chevaux." Now he ceased to wonder. He was one of
the forty men.... At the rail-head he began to march, and at last
joined the remnant of his battalion. They had been through hard
fighting, and were now in billets. Until he joined them he had not
realized the drain there had been on the reserves at home. Very many
familiar faces of officers were missing. New men had taken their
place. And very many of his old comrades had gone, some to Blighty,
some West of that Island of Desire; and those who remained had the
eyes of children who had passed through the Valley of the Shadow of
Death.

McPhail and Mo Shendish had passed through unscathed. In the
reconstruction of the regiment chance willed that the three of them
found themselves in the same platoon of A Company. Doggie almost
embraced them when they met.

"Laddie," said McPhail to him, as he was drinking a mahogany-coloured
liquid that was known by the name of tea, out of a tin mug, and eating
a hunk of bread and jam, "I don't know whether or not I'm pleased to
see you. You were safer in England. Once I misspent many months of my
life in shielding you from the dangers of France. But France is a much
more dangerous place nowadays, and I can't help you. You've come right
into the thick of it. Just listen to the hell's delight that's going
on over yonder."

The easterly wind brought them the roar streaked with stridence of the
artillery duel in progress on the nearest sector of the Front.

They were sitting in the cellar entrance to a house in a little town
which had already been somewhat mauled. Just opposite was a shuttered
house on the gr