At ten o'clock that night two Englishmen once more brought a machine gun into the Hôtel Fauçon; they worked the weapon for twenty minutes from the window within ten feet of which McDermott now lay with his brandy bottle beside him. Once McDermott stirred; he sat up sleepily on the floor and murmured: “An' where is that war now? Begad, an' I don't belave there is anny war!” And he rolled over and went to sleep again. The men with the machine gun did not notice him; they were too busy. A moment later one of them sank with a bullet through his heart. His comrade lasted a little longer, and then he, too, went down, a wound in his lungs. It took him some weary minutes to choke and bleed to death, there in that dark place, upon the floor, among the dead men and McDermott's brandy bottles and the heap of ammunition he had brought with him. Hist struggle did not wake McDermott. By midnight the British had been driven back until they held the houses at the west end of the town and the end of the spur railroad that came eastward from Hazebrouck. The Germans were in the eastern part of the village, and between was a “no man's land,” of which the Grande Place was a part. What was left of the Hôtel Faucon, with the sleeping McDermott in it, was toward the middle of the south side of the square. In the streets to the north and south of the Place patrols still clashed with grenade and bayonet and rifle, but the Germans attempted no further advance in any force after midnight. No doubt they were bringing up more men; no doubt, with the first morning light, they would move forward a regiment or two, possibly even a division, against the British who still clung stubbornly to the western side of the town. All the way from Wytschaete south to Givenchy the battle-line was broken up into many little bitter struggles of this sort, the British at every point facing great odds. When dawn came, there came with it a mist. And three men of a German patrol, creeping from house to house and ruin to ruin along the south side of that part of “no man's land” which was the Grande Place, entered the open door of the Hôtel Fauçon. One of them stepped upon McDermott's stomach, where he lay sleeping and dreaming of the war he had come to look at.