him in the open? He climbed out and stood on the edge ready to jump down again if another shell came. From the next trench stretcher-bearers moved towards him looking for wounded. Almost beside him a man lay in a dabble of blood; you would have thought him asleep until you saw half his head lying beside him cut neatly off by a big piece of shell. Farther over they had dug out the buried men, but only one was alive. The Corporal, who had worked so gallantly in the bombardment, collapsed suddenly with twitching hands and staring, frightened eyes, proclaiming the shell-shock he had held off while the work had to be done. Stretcher-bearers came, carrying broken moaning wounded. The Subaltern, shamed by their calm, braced himself and stepped into the open.
There he met another Sub. helping along a Captain, an old friend of his. MacTaggart greeted him cheerily, and was answered by a hopeless stare and a writhing mouth trying in vain to form words. The Captain was dumb.
“That last 8-inch burst almost on him,” the other Subaltern explained. “All the men with him were killed, and he’s got it badly. Come on now, Willie. It’s all right now.”
The dumb man mumbled piteously and cringed to the ground as a shell whined over. The two started to take him along to
