A crash and a flare!
A blast of fire struck the boy in the face and all became blank.
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.