on, get at it; that blighter’s a mile over.” The gang, who had paused a moment in their labour to crouch and look up as a shell roared over, “got at it,” slung the log into place, and had the long spike nails that held the transverse planks to “the ribbon” or binding edge log half hammered home before the shell had burst in a cataract of mud and smoke three hundred yards beyond. The shells weren’t always beyond. Man after man was sent hobbling, or carried groaning, back over the road he had helped to build; man after man, until there were six in a row, was lifted to a patch of slightly drier mud near the roadside and left there—because the road needed every hand more than did the dead who were past needing anything. The job was hard driven at the end, and with all the hard driving was barely done to time. About 4 o’clock an artillery subaltern rode over the planks to where the gang worked at the road-end, his horse slithering and picking its way fearfully over the muddy wet planks. “Can’t we come through yet?” he asked, and the Captain himself told him no, he was afraid not, because it would interrupt his work. “But hang it all,” said the Gunner officer, “there’s a couple of miles of guns and waggons waiting back there at the Control. If they’re not through before dark——” “They won’t be,” said the Captain mildly, “not till my time to finish, and that’s 5 o’clock. You needn’t look at your watch,” he went on, “I know it’s not five yet, because I told my men they must finish by five—and they’re not finished yet.” He said the last words very quietly, but very distinctly, and those of the gang who heard passed it round the rest as an excellent jest which had completed the “’tillery bloke’s” discomfiture. But the Captain’s jest had a double edge. “Start along at five,” he had called to the retiring Gunner, “and she’ll be ready for you. This Company puts its work through on time, always.” And the Company did, cramming a good two hours’ work into the bare one to make good the boast; picking and spading tremendously at the shell-torn earth to level a way for the planks, filling in deep and shallow holes, carrying or dragging or rolling double burdens of logs and planks, flinging them into place, spiking them together with a rapid fusillade of click-clanking hammer-blows. They ceased to take cover or even to stop and crouch from the warning yells of approaching shells; they flung off the gas-masks, hooked at the “Alert” high on their chests, to give freer play to their arms; they wallowed in mud and slime, and cursed and laughed in turn at it, and the road, and the job, and the Army, and the war. But they finished to time, and actually at 5 o’clock they drove the last spikes while the first teams were scrabbling over the last dozen loose planks.