And the infantrymen! Scattered through the woods about their rabbit-warren of dugouts, they looked and acted like boys on holiday, on some camping excursion. They chatted and frolicked, and grumbled about the food, and because they were not relieved and sent to rest billets, and because the enemy did not try to advance, and because they themselves were not sent against the enemy. Kendall absorbed a feeling that they rather liked the whole thing, that it was just the life they were born to and were fitted to live—and that they knew it. It was a picture, there in the _bois_, a picture that touched the imagination of that young man from the peaceful Middle West and would not soon be erased from his memory. The trees grew closely, admitting only patches of sunlight here and there, with an effect of peaceful, lazy, restful shade. One saw dimly. The scene was soothing to the eyes, alive as it was with movement. The brown of uniforms blended with the yellow-green of the foliage and with the red-yellow of the upturned soil where it had been broken by hundreds of shovels in the fashioning of shelters.... Kendall stood and watched and knew that he was beholding a sight which, in the years of his age, he would see again and describe again, and live again in the telling.... It excited him, yet he wondered why it should excite him more than it had done when he had seen other khaki-clad boys in camps in America.... It was because these boys slept with death for a blanket-mate. It was because no man of them knew what minute might call him with awful suddenness over the threshold of life and into the mysteries of death.... There had been no fire from the enemy. Since the dawn their guns had been silent, but now, without warning, the air was filled with a threat, with a sound which Kendall had never heard before, but which he recognized by the instinct of self-preservation which resided in him. It was the rushing, shrieking, rending, express-train rush of a big shell—not of a shell going, but of one coming. It startled Kendall. For an instant he was blind and deaf to everything in the universe but the approach of that shell, and it seemed to him to be directing itself exactly at the small of his back. He wanted to dodge, to run, to obliterate himself from that portion of the earth, but there was no place to betake himself. It was a matter of seconds, of parts of a second. The shell screeched over their heads and detonated over toward the farm-house.... And Ken became fully conscious again, a bit surprised that he was still in the same spot and that he had not made himself ridiculous.