About four o'clock in the afternoon the German climbed up into his favourite scarp once more. Hoping to draw his opponent's fire, he jerked his head up into sight for half a second, then jerked it down again. The trick worked; the Frenchman fired, but fired high. The German shoved his gun barrel out between two clods, shut both eyes--for he was by no means a clever marksman--and pumped a shot back in reply. The bullet from his rifle, which was a long, sharp-nosed, steel-jacketed bullet, devised in accordance with the most scientific experiments, found its billet. It struck the Frenchman as he lay belly downward on the earth with his gunstock against his cheek. It removed two fingers of the Frenchman's right hand, three fingers of his left hand, tore away his lower jaw, beard and all, and passed out at the back of his neck, taking splintered fragments of his spinal processes with it. He turned over on his back, flapping with his arms and legs, threshing about in the wet leaves and in the mud, making grotesque bubbling sounds down in his throat. Pretty soon after that twilight came on and the rifle firing slackened. The Saxon youth, never knowing he had killed his enemy, called it a day and knocked off. He hunkered down in the slime to eat a tallowy stew of bull meat and barley from a metal pannikin. It was nourishing enough, this mess was, but it had the aspect of swill. Having eaten, he immediately thereafter crawled, in his wet clothes and soaked boots, into a sort of dugout hollowed in the wall of his trench, and slept there with four of his comrades on a bed of mouldy, damp rye straw. While they slept the vermin travelled from one to another of them, making discriminative choice of which body to bite. Down in the little forest below, the Frenchman presently quit flapping and quietly bled to death. During the night a burial party of his own people came and found him and shovelled him underground where he lay. But first the sergeant in command of the squad removed the bangle from his wrist. In due course of time, therefore, word was carried back and back by succeeding stages to headquarters, and from there on to Paris, and from Paris on to New York, so that within a month's time or a little less it became the painful duty of a consular clerk in New York to transmit by mail to the deceased's next of kin, a sister, the intelligence, as conveyed in the official notification, that her brother, Paul Gaston Michel Misereux, was heroically dead on the Field of Honour.