their four legs sticking out post-stiff in the air; in several places there were broken-down carts, in one place a regular mass of them piled up and locked in a confused tangle of broken wheels, splintered shafts, cut harness, and smashed woodwork, their contents spilled out anyhow and mixed up inextricably with the wreckage. There was not much traffic in the main street, and such as was there was evidently, like the Captain himself, only there because no other road offered. There were half a dozen artillery ammunition waggons, a few infantry transport carts, several Army Service Corps vehicles. All of them were moving at a trot, the waggons rumbling and lumbering heavily and noisily over the cobblestones, the drivers stooped forward and peering out anxiously to pick a way between the obstacles in their path. The shells were coming over continuously, moaning and howling and yelling, falling with tearing crashes amongst the houses, blowing them wall from wall, slicing corners off or cutting a complete top or end away, breaking them down in rattling cascades of tiles and bricks, bursting them open and flinging them high and far upwards and outwards in flying fragments. As the car crawled cautiously through the debris that littered the street, pieces of brick and mortar, whole or broken slates, chips of wood and stone, pattered and rapped constantly down about and on the car; the wheels crunched and ground on splintered glass from the gaping windows. A shell roared down on the street ahead of them, burst thunderously in a vivid sheet of flame and spurting black cloud of smoke, an appalling crash that rolled and reverberated loud and long up and down the narrow street. “Go easy,” cautioned the Captain as the black blinding reek came swirling down to meet them, “or you’ll run into the hole that fellow made.” The driver’s face was set and white, and his hands gripped tight on the wheel; the Captain had a sudden compunction that he had brought him, that he had not left the car outside the town and walked through. They edged carefully past the yawning shell-crater with the smoke still clinging and curling up from its edges, and, free of the smoke again, saw a fairly clear stretch ahead of them. The Captain heard the thin but rising whistle of another heavy shell approaching, and “Open her out,” he said quickly, “and let her rip.” The driver, he noticed, for all his white face had his nerves well under control, and steadily caught the change of gear on the proper instant, speeded up sharply but quite smoothly. The car swooped down the clear stretch, the roar of the shell growing louder and closer, and just as they reached and crammed the brakes on to take the corner, they heard the shell crash down behind them. The Captain leaned out and looked back, and had a momentary glimpse of a house on the street spouting black smoke, dissolving and cascading down and out across the road in a torrent of bricks and wreckage. In