He turned again to Mr. Gerry. “Ah, sir, ‘_Dulce decorum_,’ as all men know or must learn. Let us go inside, and send someone to lead my horse away, for he is as spent as I.” Tom walked thoughtfully back to where his comrades would still be asleep in the empty cart. ‘_Dulce decorum_’! He knew what the Latin meant, for President Langdon had translated it yesterday afternoon. “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” But was it, he wondered. The sun felt gloriously warm on his back, and made his blood tingle. The birds were singing in the elm trees round the Common. Kitty was a pretty girl, and there were other pretty girls. Sweet to die? That sounded like a thing old men would think of, tired old men who never had to go out and fight, who would die in bed at ninety-three or so. Still, if you had to do it, you had to do it, and he guessed he was as ready as he’d ever be. Over towards Charlestown he heard the boom of a heavy gun. _Chapter Thirteen_ THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN Gerry Malory was back in Devonshire at daybreak on that hot June morning, only it did not seem to him to be morning, or any special time of day. He stood in a low valley opening toward the sea, and there were little farms all around him with hedgerows in between them, and here and there a church spire reaching toward the sky. He was not alone, for a man stood beside him, a man he had never seen before, about his father’s age, dressed in quaint old-fashioned clothes, and carrying an ancient gun. The gun looked like the one that belonged to the Yankee that had taken him prisoner in the tavern by Ipswich Green. The man was shaking his head and scowling. He seemed to be angry about something. Gerry was ready to protest that he hadn’t done anything wrong, when suddenly he thought that maybe he had. Maybe he’d been poaching again. Just then the man spoke. “It’s the coming country, lad,” he said. “Don’t make the mistake I did in my time.” “What mistake?” Gerry murmured, but he thought he knew. His words were drowned out by the deep boom of thunder. Again and again the thunder sounded, and the echoes rolled over valley and hill and sea. His body shook like an aspen in a storm wind; his eyelids snapped wide apart. He was in the warehouse behind the stables near Long Wharf in Boston, Massachusetts, and Sergeant Higgs had him by the shoulder. The thunder still boomed in his ears, but the Devon landscape had gone back into his memory, where it probably came from. He was lying on his own blanket on a heap of straw, with the regiment’s goat tethered nearby. “Wake up, lad! Don’t you hear the guns?” Higgs was saying. Gerry pulled himself erect. He found it hard to come out of the dream that had seemed so real to him. “Yes, I hear them,” he said. “Whose guns are they?” “Whose would they be?” scoffed the sergeant. “Do you think the Yankees have guns like that?”