For a minute it seemed to McDermott that possibly there was no McDermott, either. When McDermott regained consciousness of McDermott, he was sitting on the ground, and he sat there and felt of himself for many seconds before he spoke or rose. Great guns he had been hearing for hours, and a rattle and roll of small-arms fire had been getting nearer all that day; but it seemed to McDermott that there was something quite vicious and personal about the big shell that had separated him forever from his mules. Not that he had loved the mules, but he loved McDermott. “Mules,” said he, still sitting on the ground, but trying to get his philosophy of life on to its legs again, “is here wan minute an' gawn the nixt. Mules is fickle an' untrustworthy animals. Here was thim mules, wigglin' their long ears and arsk-in' f'r Gawd's sake c'u'd they have a dhrink of wather, an' promisin' a lifelong friendship--but where is thim mules now?” He scratched his red head as he spoke, feeling-of an old scar under the thick thatch of hair. The wound had been made some years previously with a bung starter, and whenever McDermott was agitated he caressed it tenderly. He got up, turned about and regarded the extraordinary Grande Place. There had once been several pretty little shops about it, he could see, with pleasant courtyards, where the April sun was trying to bring green things into life again, but now some of these were in newly made and smoking ruins. The shell that had stricken McDermott's mules from the roster of existence had not been the only one to fall into the village recently. But it was neither old ruins nor new ruins that interested McDermott chiefly. It was the humanity that flowed through the Grande Place in a feeble trickle westward, and the humanity that stayed there. Women and old men went by with household treasures slung in bundles or pushed before them in carts and perambulators, and they were wearing their best clothes, as if they were going to some village fête, instead of into desolation and homelessness; the children whom they carried, or who straggled after them, were also in their holiday best. Here was an ancient peasant with a coop of skinny chickens on a barrow; there was a girl in a silk gown carrying something in a bed quilt; yonder was a boy of twelve on a bicycle, and two things were tied to the handlebars--a loaf of bread and a soldier's bayonet. Perhaps it had been his father's bayonet. Quietly they went westward; their lips were dumb and their faces showed their souls were dumb, too. A long time they had heard the battle growling to the eastward; and now the war was upon them. It was upon them, indeed; for as McDermott gazed, another shell struck full upon a bell-shaped tower that stood at the north side of the Grande Place and it leaped up in flames and fell in dust and ruin, all gone but one irregular point of masonry that still stuck out like a snaggle tooth from a trampled skull.