in rather brashly. The rest of us were out in the open where we
could duck and perhaps avoid the spray of shrapnel. But an ambulance
was no more protection against fifty pounds of German junk than an
umbrella. And there sat Henry in the ambulance wistfully looking
through the window of the vehicle and realizing that his exposure
was less in a dignified sitting posture in the ambulance than
it would be horizontally half in and half out of the thing, held
fast in the vain endeavour to get away. So he waited for the next
"arrive" to come with commendable fortitude. And then it came. It
sounded like the old grand-daddy of all shells. We fancied we could
sense its direction; possibly that was imagination. But anyway we
looked toward the German lines and realized Henry's grave danger.
And then it struck--whanged with an awful roar about seventy-five
feet from us, against the bare trunk of a shell-stripped tree.
We knew without looking that the shell had hit the tree. Then our
consciousness recorded the fact that a French soldier had been
standing by that tree. And slowly and in terror we turned our
eyes tree-ward. The tree was a mass of splinters. It looked like
a special sale of toothpicks in a show window. Then we turned our
eyes toward the place where we had last seen the French soldier.
We hardly dared to look. But instead of seeing a splatter of blood
and flesh upon the earth by the tree stump, we saw the soldier
rise from the buck-brush where he had been ducking, and light a
cigarette. The shell had hit not a dozen feet above him, but had
sprayed its fountain from him, instead of toward him. He had some
trouble lighting his cigarette and was irritated for a second at
his inconvenience. But so far as we could see, the fact that death
had reached for him and missed him by inches had left no impression
upon his mind. Three years in war had wrought some deep change in
him. Was it entirely in his nerves or was it deeper than nerves,