The words had scarcely left his lips when everything seemed to be suddenly swallowed up in a soul-terrifying roar. A vivid orange flame rose skyward, and as Dennis soared upward through the air and fell with a plump into a field of beetroot, the world turned black and he lost consciousness.
How long he lay he did not know, but when he opened his eyes it was almost light, and the face of his wristlet watch had been smashed to atoms.
For a few seconds he remained quite still, not daring to move from fear of what movement might tell him, but at last, sitting up, he felt himself all over and breathed a sigh of deep thankfulness to find that he had no bones broken.
He remembered that they had been running into an avenue where the trees met overhead and formed a species of tunnel, and the avenue was still there before him, one of the poplars headless like poor Captain Thompson, and showing a great white scar where the shell had caught it.
And then he rose to his feet, to find himself half a dozen yards from the narrow road, his heart standing still as he saw the mangled chassis of the motor, entirely stripped of its body works, reared up on one end at the edge of the crater.
The whole road seemed to have been scooped out to the depth of several feet, and how he had escaped destruction was little short of miraculous. The skirt of his own tunic was rent to rags and ribbons, his Sam Browne belt, map-case, and glasses were gone, and the French general's message with them, and a great sob shook the lad as he walked slowly to the ruined car.
The first thing he saw was a human leg swathed to the knee in a stained puttee, and a stride farther on was the rest of his companion, so shockingly mutilated that it was only with an effort he could bring himself to examine it.
"Poor chap, poor chap!" he muttered. "An end like this after eighteen months at the wheel!"
There was no trace of the captain's body; it was probably buried deep in the shell hole, or else plastered far and wide over the hillside with the debris of the motor.
He stooped and opened the chauffeur's coat, which bulged suggestively, and drew out a little case containing his identification papers and driver's licence, perhaps also letters from home.