In taking their places in the funk holes, which had been dug by the Germans when they were in possession of that piece of ground, Hal and Chester had calculated on just one thing—having time to fit themselves into the holes before shells should find them. And now that both found it necessary to make a quick fit of it, they were disgusted with their laziness in not spending enough energy and taking the chances necessary to making them big enough in the first place. "Why didn’t I?" That was the question each lad asked himself a dozen times during the brief space of a moment they lay there half exposed and waiting for that which they feared. It broke at last. The earth boiled, up, a mass of clods and stones, only a few yards in front of Hal. A piece of shell fragment struck his helmet a glancing blow; another buried itself in the earth only a few inches from his nose. Hal crawled out of his funk hole and reinserted himself, making sure this time that he was below the surface. By his watch it lacked still five minutes of 11 o’clock. Almost time for all this business to stop. At intervals for several seconds, Boche shells came screaming in, exploding hither and yon. "Gas! Gas!" came the startling cry down the line. Chester crawled deliberately into his gas mask, for the bursts, which he recognized on the moment as being gas shells, had been too far away to cause them any immediate alarm. There followed then a strange, unbelievable silence, as though the world had died. It lasted but a moment, for perhaps the space that a breath may be held. Again Hal glanced at his watch. "Eleven o’clock!" He uttered the words aloud. Eleven o’clock. The armistice was now effective. Fighting should cease. Came suddenly such an uproar of relief and jubilance, such a shrieking of claxons—gas claxons that shrieked now with pure joy—and such a shout from both lines that only men possessed of sheer happiness can utter. Chester pulled off his gas mask and shouted with the rest. And even as he did so he caught a faint odor which he knew to be that of mustard gas. But nothing mattered now. Hal and Chester piled out of their funk holes with the rest, waving their helmets and shouting at the top of their voices. Then, like a covey of quail scurrying from a hawk’s shadow, they piled back again. "Whizz—bang!" Scarcely ten yards from Chester’s hole a shell exploded. "Wow!" exclaimed a voice. "Who said the war was over? Marshal Foch’ll have to come out and tell me himself before I believe it." Another brief silence. A 75 barked behind Hal and Chester. Then the battle seemed to start anew, one of the American batteries firing and then another; the contest seemed to be between two batteries of 75’s. Chester could never remember which battery fired last, but he heard, a few days later, that two second lieutenants of artillery were haled blushingly before a general and severely reprimanded for disregarding the rules of the armistice.