They all fumblingly and hastily put on their gas masks, and stumbled on blindly down the trench. Winterbourne and Evans scrambled out on to the road, and got into the edge of the village. A rain of gas shells was falling on it and all around their billets—zwiing, zwiing, zwiing, zwiing, PHUT PHUT PHUT PHUT. Each took off his mask a second and gave one sniff—the air reeked with phosgene. Evans and Winterbourne stood at the end of the trench to help out the groping half-blinded men. As they filed by, grotesques with india-rubber faces, great dead-looking goggles, and long tubes from their mouths to the box respirators, Winterbourne thought they looked like lost souls, expiating some horrible sin in a new Inferno. The rolled gas blankets were pulled down tightly over the cellar entrances, but the gas leaked through. Two men were gassed and taken off in stretchers, foaming rather horribly at the mouth. * * * * * The gas bombardment went on until dawn, and then ceased. Winterbourne fell asleep, with his gas mask just off his face. Hitherto they had slept with the box respirator slung on a nail or piled with the other equipment; after the experience of this and the subsequent nights they always slept with the respirator on their chests and the mask ready to slip on immediately. The heavies began again soon after it was light. Winterbourne was awakened by one which crashed just outside his cellar. He lay on the floor for a long time listening to the zwiiiING, CRASH, of the shells. He heard two ruined houses clatter to the ground under direct hits, and wondered if the cellars had held firm. They hadn’t. But fortunately, they happened to be unoccupied. Presently, the German batteries switched off and began bombarding some artillery about five hundred yards to the left. Winterbourne profited by the lull to wash. He ran out of the cellar in his shirtsleeves and gas mask, with the canvas bucket in which he washed; and found that a shell had smashed the pump outside his billet. He knew there was another about three hundred yards to the right, although he had never been there. It was another cold but sunny morning, with the inevitable white shrapnel bursts all over the sky. He was now so accustomed to them that he scarcely noticed their existence. Occasionally a very faint rattle of machine-gun fire came from the war in the air, of which he was nearly as ignorant as people in England of the war on land. He took off his mask and sniffed. A fresh wind was blowing, and although there was plenty of phosgene in the air, it was not in any deadly concentration. He decided to risk leaving the mask off. The ground was deeply delved with the conical holes made by the big shells thrown over, and pitted everywhere by the smaller holes of the gas shells. He found a dud, and examined it with interest. A brownish-looking shell, about the size of a five-nine.