They had been in action for eighteen days; and not once during that time had “B” battery’s guns been wholly silent. Of the men who had served those guns so blithely under the trees of Neuve Eglise barely one-third remained. Sergeant Ackroyd was dead, breast riven by direct hit of a gas-shell; Sergeant Duncan was dead, blown to bits as he ran for shelter; Corporal Haviland’s body lay drilled with machine-gun bullets in the No Man’s Land beyond Arrowhead Copse; seven signallers were dead, five they had watched hobble, one by one, up the sodden path to the dressing-station in Montauban. Now this ultimate horror had screamed down upon them out of the night, tearing the last veils between them and Hell. . . . They had laboured three hours to cleanse that Hell, laboured calmly and cheerfully among their men, snatching only this brief respite for food and drink. But the Hell they had cleansed from the ground still remained, desperately and damnably clear, in their brains. For the moment, the reticences of civilized life were in abeyance. Each of these two knew, as he crouched over the bacon-box in the sodden broken chalk-trench, that he was hanging on by the eye-teeth to his last remnant of sanity. Each still saw the same bestial vision: smashed pit, half-buried gun, slithering soil, mangled men writhing and groaning, mangled men lying deadly still, Charlie Straker’s face white and drawn in the light of the hurricane-lamp—and the Head that watched him, the Head that still grinned under its shrapnel-helmet, the Head which had been Pettigrew. . . . “That leaves only you and me, P.J.” Sandiland’s fingers plucked at one of the rents in his tunic sleeve. “Only you and me.” His voice quivered up into his head, and he began singing—“You and me together, love; never mind the weather, love.” “Shut up, you bloody fool”—Peter’s haggard eyes stared across the candle-flame. “Shut up, I tell you. Why the hell don’t you drink that whisky?” “Sorry, P.J.”—Sandiland crammed the mug against his teeth, sucked down the raw spirit. “By God, that’s good. Pour me out another, there’s a good chap”—he drank again—“I suppose we ought to telephone H.Q.” “I did that while you were getting them away.” “Thanks, dear boy. Purves say anything?” “I spoke to the Colonel”—Peter started to cough—“and he said—damn this cough of mine—he said, ‘should he come up himself?’ I told him the gun would be in action again by midnight, and we could carry on all right if he’d get us another subaltern. He’s sending one up at once”—Peter’s voice too, quivered up into his head. “Poor old Lindsay. Do you remember?” Once again, sanity trembled in the balance. Their haggard eyes met across the candle-flame; and from behind those eyes naked soul looked at naked soul.