Two men were carrying the remains of O Nine Morgan, the trunk wrapped in a ground sheet. They carried him in a bandy chair out of the hut. His arms over his shoulders waved a jocular farewell. There would be an ambulance stretcher on bicycle wheels outside. CHAPTER II The "All Clear" went at once after that. Its suddenness was something surprising, the mournful-cheerful, long notes dying regretfully on a night that had only just gone quiet after the perfectly astonishing row. The moon had taken it into its head to rise; begumboiled, jocular and grotesque, it came from behind the shoulder of one of the hut-covered hills and sent down the lines of Tietjen's huts, long, sentimental rays that converted the place into a slumbering, pastoral settlement. There was no sound that did not contribute to the silence, little dim lights shone through the celluloid casements. Of Sergeant-Major Cowley, his numerals gilded by the moon in the lines of A Company, Tietjens, who was easing his lungs of coke vapours for a minute, asked in a voice that hushed itself in tribute to the moonlight and the now keen frost: "Where the deuce is the draft?" The sergeant-major looked poetically down a ribbon of whitewashed stones that descended the black downside. Over the next shoulder of hill was the blur of a hidden conflagration. "There's a Hun plane burning down there. In Twenty-Seven's parade ground. The draft's round that, sir," he said. Tietjens said: "Good God!" in a voice of caustic tolerance. He added, "I did think we had drilled some discipline into these blighters in the seven weeks we have had them. . . . You remember the first time when we had them on parade and that acting lance-corporal left the ranks to heave a rock at a sea-gull. . . . And called you 'OI' Hunkey! . . . Conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline? Where's that Canadian sergeant-major? Where's the officer in charge of the draft?" Sergeant-Major Cowley said: "Sergeant-Major Ledoux said it was like a cattle-stampede on the . . . some river where they come from. You _couldn't_ stop them, sir. It was their first German plane. . . . And they going up the line to-night, sir." "To-night!" Tietjens exclaimed. "Next Christmas!" The sergeant-major said: