Over us black smoke from the Jack Johnsons rolled as it rolls out of the stacks of soft-coal burning locomotives; the outrageous din never slackened, but our deafened ears had become insensible under the repeated blows of sound, yet not paralyzed. For I remember, squatting there in that shell crater, hearing a cricket tranquilly tuning up between the thunderclaps which shook earth and sods down on us and wrinkled the pool of water at our feet. The Legion had taken the trench; but the place was a rabbit warren where hundreds of holes and burrows and ditches and communicating runways made a bewildering maze. And everywhere in the dull, flame-shot obscurity, the Legionaries ran about like ghouls in their hoods and round, hollow eye-holes; masked faces, indistinct in the smoke, loomed grotesque and horrible as Ku-Klux where the bayonets were at work digging out the enemy from blind burrows, turning them up from their bloody forms. Rifles blazed down into bomb-proofs, cracked steadily over the heads of comrades who piled up sandbags to block communication trenches; grenade-bombs rained down through the smoke into trenches, blowing bloody gaps in huddling masses of struggling Teutons until they flattened back against the parados and lifted arms and gun-butts stammering out, "Comrades! Comrades!"--in the ghastly irony of surrender. A man whose entire helmet, gas-mask, and face had been blown off, and who was still alive and trying to speak, stiffened, relaxed, and died in my arms. As I rolled him aside and turned to the next man whom the bearers were lowering into the crater, his respirator and goggles fell apart, and I found myself looking into the ashy face of Duck Werner. As we laid him out and stripped away iron helmet and tunic, he said in a natural and distinct voice. "Through the belly, Doc. Gimme a drink." There was no more water or stimulant at the moment and the puddle in the crater was bloody. He said, patiently, "All right; I can wait.... It’s in the belly.... It ain’t nothin’, is it?" I said something reassuring, something about the percentage of recovery I believe, for I was exceedingly busy with Duck’s anatomy. "Pull me through, Doc?" he inquired calmly. "Sure...." "Aw, listen, Doc. Don’t hand me no cones of hokey-pokey. Gimme a deck of the stuff. Dope out the coke. Do I get mine this trip?" I looked at him, hesitating. "Listen, Doc, am I hurted bad? Gimme a hones’ deal. Do I croak?" "Don’t talk, Duck----" "Dope it straight. _Do_ I?" "Yes." "I thought you’d say that," he returned serenely. "Now I’m goin’ to fool you, same as I fooled them guys at Bellevue the night that Mike the Kike shot me up in the subway." A pallid sneer stretched his thin and burning lips; in his ratty eyes triumph gleamed.