Then, slowly, slowly, out from a black void, Horace felt his consciousness struggling back. It was as though his brain were a jagged mountain which his mind was trying to climb. With an inward panic, he opened his eyes. He found himself in a clump of bushes, stunned and dazed. Gropingly he passed his hands over his face. His eyebrows and eyelashes were gone, scorched away by the flame. There was a smell of singeing on his clothes. A terrific nausea possessed him, caused, though he did not know it, by the vacuum produced by the shell-burst. Otherwise he was unhurt. Painfully and with a strong feeling of unreality, the boy staggered to his feet and looked around him. In the road was a deep hole, upon which a cloud of dust was slowly settling. The air still seemed to rock backwards and forwards with the vibration, and the falling leaves whirled irregularly to the ground. But--where were the others? For the moment, Horace lost his nerve. "Where are they? Where are they?" he screamed, his high-pitched cry rasping his blistered throat. Then, "Steady, Monroe," he heard a voice behind him. "You will need all your courage." Horace turned at the words. The master was kneeling at the side of the road, beside Deschamps, who was stretched out limply, the blood oozing from a wound in his forehead. The sight steadied Horace at once. He got a grip on himself, though he was still dizzy and sick with the shock of the shell and his head was ringing painfully. One ear seemed deaf. A black giddiness seized him as he crossed the road with staggering, uncertain steps. "Is he killed?" asked Horace. "No," answered the master, "but badly hurt. His wound will need instant attention. Unhinge a shutter from the cottage over there." Running with stumbling steps to the deserted bake-shop, Horace lifted from its hinges one of the long shutters and dragged it back to where his comrade lay. "Put him on this," said the master softly. Together they lifted the would-be recruit and laid him gently on the shutter, then picked up the burden, the master taking the head and Horace the feet. "Where to, sir?" asked Horace, as he took a firm grip on the improvised stretcher. "To Embourg Village," was the reply; "we must find a doctor at once." They had not gone another two hundred yards when the screech of an approaching shell was heard. "Put him down," cried the master, "and lie down flat yourself!" Horace did not delay. Gently, but rapidly, he lowered his end of the stretcher and laid himself flat on the bed of the road. He had hardly touched ground when a shell hit a house not more than eighty yards in front of them. The boy saw the great shell, like a black streak, just before it struck. Then, even before he heard the explosion, he saw the whole house lift itself into the air, quite silently. "Put your fingers in your ears!" cried the master.