He went out grumbling, and William followed him, feeling his way by the banisters, for the electric light was turned off while he was still on the upper landing; other men from all over the warren of a building were descending likewise, and they bumped and jostled each other in the sudden darkness on the stairs. There were jests as they bumped and much creaking of boots—through which, while William was still a flight from the ground floor, came the first rapid thudding of "Archie." On it, a moment later, an unmistakable bomb and the pattering outburst of machine-guns.... William listened curiously; it was his first experience of an air raid, and though the pace of his heart quickened, as yet there was no real fear in him; but a man pressed against him by the descending stream gasped audibly and clawed round William’s arm with his fingers. The action was fear made manifest in darkness, and William, instinctively knowing it infectious, repelled it and strove to free his wrist; but the shaking fingers, eloquent of terror, only clung more tightly to their hold. "What is it?" William snapped. "What’s the matter?" "It’s me—Wright," a voice whispered back in jerks. "I can’t help it—the Lord knows I try, but I can’t. If it was shells I could stand ’em, but——" A near-by gun beat down his voice but did not stop it—"at Dunkirk. I was buried two hours: two mortal hours before they got me out—and when I was in hospital he came over and bombed us again. He got one right on to us, and I was blown out of bed, and the men at the other end of the ward were in pieces. In pieces, I tell you—beastly bits of flesh——" William tried to stand it—realizing that the man must cling and gibber to some one as a child clings and wails to its nurse. They had turned into a room on the ground floor—there were no cellars, but it was esteemed the safest place in the building by reason of the comparative absence of glass—and the pair of them stood backs against the wall. When Wright stopped talking—which was not often—William could hear his breath as it came whining through his teeth; and he remembered that the man wore the ribbon of the D.C.M.—a man who had once had nerve and to all appearance was sound, but who had not sufficient hold on himself to keep his terror from his tongue. He spoke of it unceasingly; whenever the sounds without died down William could hear him whispering—now of the night when he was bombed in hospital and now of the building they were in. It was no good as a shelter—would crumble like a house of cards. Nothing was any good but a cellar or trenches—there should have been trenches. And they were so damnably close to the station, and the station was just what those devils were trying to hit. There came a moment when William could bear it no more, and wrenched himself free of the clawing fingers on his sleeve; he dared not feel them longer, lest his heart also melted within him.