I honestly can’t tell you if that bomb of mine went off. For in the very lift of my arm, both Germans swung their arms into the air and hurled their bombs at me. One bomb went over my head. I am quite sure that my bomb was faulty and did not explode. The other fell directly at my feet. I had been too long trained in that game not to know what I had to do and what I had to do in a hurry. I pounced on that bomb and without loss of movement--without trying to stand erect and aim it, I shunted the bomb back at them with an upward toss of both hands. And then the big thing happened--a big thing to me but infinitely bigger to them. For that toss of the bomb cost them both their lives. I don’t like to recall what I afterward saw--when smashed, bleeding and reeling, I looked to see what had become of my two enemies. The truth is they were blown to pieces. One man’s severed head was nearly at my feet. The star-shell showed it to me. It was staring up at me with a frightful grimace. Their bodies were scattered in that pathway as though they had been hacked to pieces by an ax--worse than that--as though they had been hacked to pieces by an ax with a roughened, dull edge. In the first of the explosion, of course, I knew nothing of this. I was receiving my own crippling from the back blast of the German bomb I had hurled at them. There was a glare and a sudden shock in my face as though I had been struck on the mouth with a sledgehammer. Of course, I went down. But as far as my own recollection goes I was not knocked unconscious and I was immediately afterward sitting up in the pathway while I coughed and sputtered blood from a mouth in which all the upper teeth had been cracked or blown out and the upper jaw itself broken. Then, as the earth stopped swaying, I knew my right arm was numb and stared at it. My hand was a red mangle. At the same time there came a realization of hellish paroxysms of pain on the left side of my face and biting savagely at my left arm. I touched my face with my left hand and instinctively drew the fingers away in horror. The flesh of my face was raw. My long soldier’s training was my salvation now. I doubt whether without it I should have known just what to do and have done it with the promptness and precision of a man used to obeying military orders. At any rate, once I realized my condition, once I had looked upon my red, smashed hand, the slit sleeve and the flesh all torn beneath it, I immediately reached with my serviceable hand into the little pocket in the inside of my jacket for the precious vial of iodine.