Now we’re on the way ’ome, I’d hate to have another of them shells drop on us, and put us out for good, mebbe.” They pushed on again, for the light was failing, and although the moon was already up, the half-light made the broken ground more difficult than ever to traverse. Pug had fallen silent, and one of the bearers, noticing the gripped lips and pain-twisted face, called to the other man and put the stretcher down and fumbled out a pill. “Swallow that,” he said, and put it between Pug’s lips; “an’ that’s the last one I have.” He daubed a ghastly blue cross on Pug’s cheek to show he had been given an opiate, and then they went on again. They crept slowly across the ground where the Germans had made one of their counter-attacks, and the price they had paid in it was plain to be seen in the piled heaps of dead that lay sprawled on the open and huddled anyhow in the holes and ditches. There were hundreds upon hundreds in that one patch of ground alone, and Kentucky wondered vaguely how many such patches there were throughout the battlefield. The stretcher-bearers were busy with the wounded, who in places still remained with the dead, and sound German prisoners under ridiculously slender guards were carrying in stretchers with badly wounded Germans or helping less severely wounded ones to walk back to the British rear. A little further on they crossed what had been a portion of trench held by the Germans and from which they appeared to have been driven by shell and mortar fire. Here there were no wounded, and of the many dead the most had been literally blown to pieces, or, flung bodily from their shelters, lay broken and buried under tumbled heaps of earth. Half a dozen Germans in long, flapping coats and heavy steel “coal-scuttle” helmets worked silently, searching the gruesome débris for any living wounded; and beyond them stood a solitary British soldier on guard over them, leaning on his bayoneted rifle and watching them. Far to the rear the flashes of the British guns lit the darkening sky with vivid, flickering gleams that came and went incessantly, like the play of summer lightning. It brought to Kentucky, trudging beside the stretcher, the swift memory of lines from a great poem that he had learned as a child and long since forgotten--the Battle Hymn of his own country. In his mind he quoted them now with sudden realization of the exactness of their fitting to the scene before him--“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored, He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword; His truth is marching on.” Here surely in these broken dead, in the silent, dejected prisoners, in the very earth she had seized and that now had been wrested from her, was Germany’s vintage, the tramplings out of the grapes of a wrath long stored, the smitten of the swift sword that flashed unloosed at last in the gun-fire lightning at play across the sky.