He could hear sounds of pick and spade scratching the chilly earth, clamping into the shale. Only a few rods away the reinforcements were hastily throwing up earth-works to hold the hard-won ground. He saw indistinct forms groping in the dusk, pulling about other forms, inanimate ones, and hastily covering them with earth. The dead were being used to more quickly fill in the embankments. In a few days those carcasses--rotting--would charge usurious toll for all the improvised help they were this fatal night. The soldier tried to crawl toward his comrades, but he could move only a few inches at a time, so intense was the agony in his legs, for the cool of night and renewed circulation had brought back his senses in full keenness. Soon dawn came and with it hell. The battle was on again, this time in other parts of the field, but the shells and bullets so often passed over him that he came to think of himself as a dead man and lived on only because nature exerted her just law. Like an opossum he feigned death. Within his sight were more than a hundred dead and twice as many wounded. Groans welled up like bubbles from a pot. Arms tossed feverishly. Backs writhed in despair. Then biscuits began falling from his own trenches; one fortunately fell near him. He also managed to get a tossed-over water bottle. To reach it he was obliged to crawl a few feet and as his hand touched it he felt a sharp pain in his shoulder and the blood trickled. A bullet had pinked him. Instinctively he fell as if dead. It was then that there occurred the thing which has inflamed the army as tow is inflamed on bonfire nights. The whole vast amphitheater was quiet. It was sundown. Nature was in her most gorgeous raiment. Both armies were at supper and an involuntary truce seemed to still the hills and valleys so lately fire-ringed. In the midst of this peace and beauty a desultory firing rang from the Russian trenches nearest the bloody angle in which lay the soldier with his comrades--dead and worse than dead. The bullets were directed, not into the opposing trenches, but into the wounded in the bloody angle. “Stand to your guns, men!” came from the Japanese trenches, and the men sprang as though to resist a sortie. But there was no sortie. The Russians were killing the wounded, that the bodies might rot and drive their comrades from below. The moving ceased, the groans ceased, the sun went down, the stars and searchlights came. Impelled by the first law of nature the soldier dragged on, wearily, as he supposed, toward his friends. But the ground was level and he must have gone laterally. Toward dawn he tumbled into a deserted trench and found a sort of sheltered dugout. It was a covered passage to the Russian fort and untenable now by either side. In it were two Japanese so desperately wounded they could not move and could barely speak. He shared his last drop of water with them.