Howe poured out the last of the champagne, and threw the bottle listlessly off into the grass, where it struck an empty shell-case and broke. "But, Will, you can't like this," he said. "It's all so like an ash-heap, a huge garbage-dump of men and equipment." "I suppose it is ..." said the ruddy-faced youth, discovering the grease on his nose and rubbing it off with the back of his hand. "Damn those dirty Fords. They get grease all over you! I suppose it is that life was so dull in America that anything seems better. I worked a year in an office before leaving home. Give me the garbage-dump." "Look," said Martin, shading his eyes with his hand and staring straight up into the sky. "There are two planes fighting." They both screwed up their eyes to stare into the sky, where two bits of mica were circling. Below them, like wads of cotton-wool, some white and others black, were rows of the smoke-puffs of shrapnel from anti-aircraft guns. The two boys watched the specks in silence. At last one began to grow larger, seemed to be falling in wide spirals. The other had vanished. The falling aeroplane started rising again into the middle sky, then stopped suddenly, burst into flames, and fluttered down behind the hills, leaving an irregular trail of smoke. "More garbage," said the ruddy-faced youth, as he rose to his feet. * * * * * "Shrapnel. What a funny place to shoot shrapnel!" "They must have got the bead on that bunch of material the genie's bringing in." There was an explosion and a vicious whine of shrapnel bullets among the trees. On the road a staff-car turned round hastily and speeded back. Martin got up from where he was lying on the grass under a pine tree, looking at the sky, and put his helmet on; as he did so there was another sharp bang overhead and a little reddish-brown cloud that suddenly spread and drifted away among the quiet tree-tops. He took off his helmet and examined it quizzically. "Tom, I've got a dent in the helmet." Tom Randolph made a grab for the little piece of jagged iron that had rebounded from the helmet and lay at his feet. "God damn, it's hot," he cried, dropping it; "anyway, finding's keepings." He put his foot on the shrapnel splinter. "That ought to be mine, I swear, Tom." "You've got the dent, Howe; what more do you want?" "Damn hog." Martin sat on the top step of the dugout, diving down whenever he heard a shell-shriek loudening in the distance. Beside him was a tall man with the crossed cannon of the artillery in his helmet, and a shrunken brown face with crimson-veined cheeks and very long silky black moustaches. "A dirty business," he said. "It's idiotic.... Name of a dog!" Grabbing each other's arms, they tumbled down the steps together as a shell passed overhead to burst in a tree down the road. "Now look at that." The man held up his musette to Howe. "I've broken the bottle of Bordeaux I had in my musette. It's idiotic." "Been on permission?"