Whish-ish-ish-ish—pow! Yooooooisntgoinbackterala—bam!
These were closer! They were landing slightly ahead of me, and at the left of the road in a little hollow where a machine-gun company in reserve was dug in I executed a flat dive into the soupy gutter and lay there, thinking rapidly. Would I go on and perhaps have a thrilling experience to relate to my grandchildren around the domestic hearth, or would I fall back and make sure of the grandchildren? There is no question about it, I do not like shells at all. It is not a fear of death, it is a fear of the noise, of the mangling mess they make. I have met only one man who is not bothered by shell-fire, and him it exhilarates. But he hates machine guns and perfectly dreads airplanes. Each to his own taste.
At the edge of a long ridge a line of trucks and motor cars were jammed while engineers filled in a trough across the road. This cavity was not the only evidence of a recent shell. On his back under a blanket which hid the awful holes in him lay a young soldier, and with cool fixed eyes and a placid smile regarded the clouds as if he could see through them something very precious and very far away perhaps the warm blue sky of Texas. How would it feel to be hit like that? Would he be smiling if he had felt any pain? Ah, why not smile, for all the pain in the world,
