The lieutenant, unable to distinguish the mumbling voices as belonging to any particular persons, vowed to himself that when the platoon was relieved and back in a rest camp, he would give them extra fatigue duty for a month. They were coming to another woods, and within a few yards of its fringes some officers stepped out and halted them. “All right, here you are.” “Lieutenant, swing your men right in here and don’t let any one get out of the woods.” The men backed in among the trees and lay down, their packs, raising their shoulders from the ground, protecting them from the moisture. They lay silent, with their rifles cradled in their arms. No one seemed to mind the wet of the grass or the chill of the air. They were all silent and rather full of fear. Time was unknown. They might have been there a year—a minute—an æon. Just as the trees, in a clump of woods, perhaps a mile away, were beginning to come out against the sluggish sky like sharp, delicate etchings, the batteries awoke. After the first flock of shells, sounding like black, screaming spirits, were fired, the men in the woods were fully aroused and many of them were standing. “Uh-h-h, did you hear that bunch of sandbags?” “They sounded as if they came from a thousand miles.” Another salvo was fired, the shells droning lazily over the heads of the men and crashing terrifically more than a mile distant. And then the smaller guns were unlimbered. The spiteful crack of the seventy-fives turned the funereal music into a scherzo. In retaliation the German batteries, the heavier ones, began, their shells flying high overhead. Lieutenant Bedford jumped up. “All right, Third Platoon. Up you come. Keep straight ahead and remember your three-yard interval. If any one gets hit, let him lie.” And then, as if he were uncertain, as if he wanted to convince himself of the actuality of the words he had just spoken, he added: “Those are the orders.” “I always knew they hated the Third,” said Lepere, “but blamed if I knew they hated our guts so much that they put us in the first wave.” But Kahl only grinned. He was conscious of a feeling as if his face had become frozen and as if his chin were about to drop off. It hung slackly and his teeth came unnaturally together when he clinched his jaws. He tightened the chin-strap of his helmet, guarding against the chance of losing his chin. Next, his feet felt so awfully heavy. They would barely permit themselves to be lifted from the ground. They had become separate identities, and as he became conscious of them he felt them to be unfamiliar. “Damn this mud,” he told himself, though knowing well that there was no mud weighing down his feet.