“Oh, was it you? Sorry. The boys are sort of stirred up about spies. They didn’t savvy you. When a strange officer comes poking around these woods looking for a place to light and asking oodles of questions about whether there’s artillery here and such like, somethin’s goin’ to happen. A couple of boys came rushin’ up to me to ask what to do, and I told them to pinch you. This place is full of spy rumors. Everybody’s seein’ them. The doughboy that hasn’t seen somethin’ darn mysterious and suspicious in the last twenty-four hours is hard to find.” “Forget it. I was some lost. Should have reported before I came down.” “Where was it they got Lieutenant Small last night?” “Down this path about a hundred yards. His horse is there yet.” Kendall and Martin walked that way. Under a shelter of boughs stood the handsome horse of which the dead lieutenant had been so fond; he stood quietly switching his tail and nibbling the leaves about him, all unconscious that his back would never again bear the weight of a gentle master.... And thirty feet away was the spot where Small had met his death, met it because he had scorned the shelter of a dugout, but with his French orderly had slept on the surface of the earth, with no shelter except a lean-to of brushwood.... On the surrounding bushes were gruesome shreds.... So this was war at last! On this spot a man had been killed by the enemy and the blood of him was not yet dry!... Somehow it convinced Kendall that he was at the front, that there was actual danger where he stood. He was experiencing the thing he had come to France hoping to experience.... And yet it was difficult to feel the fact. He had fancied the line of battle to be a constant tumult, horrible with tremendous showers of bursting shells and glorious with charges and defenses. In its stark actuality it was quite different. Affairs were gone about nonchalantly and methodically. Even the artillerymen who sent a shell now and then at some target they could not see served their guns in a bored manner. It was only by a certain tingling of the nerves that he, a tenderfoot in this business, sensed the presence of war; that war was here about him, within reach of his arm. Those seventy-fives which spoke with such a vicious, through-the-teeth bark were sending lethal shells across the sunlit landscape, causing death and wounds. Possibly that very shell which he could hear as it sped on its way might kill an enemy.... And these boys killed with an air of detachment and _ennui_....