Phil was left with this vision of her to compare with that of her as she rested in his arms while he carried her from the roadside to the gully. Then he marvelled once more at the situation. How long should he be here with these two cousins? What was going on out there amidst the sound of the guns? With all the world around in action, it was not in his nature to remain still. "Jacqueline, if any more shells come," he said, putting his head in at the kitchen door, "will you see that those two girls go into the cellar and stay?" "I'll take a saucepan to them if they don't!" Jacqueline replied. "As for you, I suppose you are going out to try to be killed, like all the other foolish men in the world," she added, without any effort to restrain him. On reaching the terrace Phil found himself with the last line of the French. In wait as for game, dust-laden figures were lying behind trees and in the open behind little banks of earth which they had spaded. They were firing and the rattle of rifles and the penetrating rat-tat of a French machine-gun from the woods at the other side of the village joined in the refrain. A thousand yards away he saw something as green as the fields, but visible on the grey ribbon of the road, melt into the earth under this burst of bullets. These must be the Germans. Sharp whistles and cracks about his ears--the answer from the rifles of the German skirmish line--made him leap to the cover of the largest tree-trunk in sight. "We forced them to deploy!" he heard an officer say. Then commands were given and the Frenchmen slipped backward on all fours till they were below the skyline, when they became running red legs under humped backs of blue as they hurried away according to plan--and just in time. For now the German guns, which had the signal, loosed their wrath on the village and the neighbouring woodland, where it was thought that the French infantry meant to make a stand in force. Phil stuck to his tree-trunk. But it did not seem of much use when he saw another tree cut in half as by a lumberman's axe with a curling black burst of smoke; and bark and limbs in all directions were being gashed by shell-fragments and shrapnel bullets. Were the girls in the cellar? He had a sense of deserting his post of duty. He did not care to make the run to the house, but felt that he must; when his honest desire was to drop into the centre of the earth and close an armoured door behind him. So he started, having in mind that he had been second in the hundred-yard dash at college, but might have been first if he had had the incentive of the present moment.